Assembly Is A Bitch

This story goes way back to 1964, boys and girls, and ends... well, maybe next week sometime. So settle in, find a cozy chair with a good spot of light, feed the critters, grab a glass of whatever,  and read on.

I'll never forget the year, since my mom complained about it so frequently. That was the year a slick Kirby salesman talked her into throwing away a whole $360-something on a brand new vacuum cleaner. I reminded her years later that she'd have spent much more on replacing ordinary cleaners over the years, and she finally quit complaining. At least to me.

I had faith in that Kirby, you see. It needed a few minor repairs over the years, mostly replacing worn belts. A few bags were needed as well, but like the pink bunny with its drum, that Kirby just kept going and going and going....

I told Mom I wanted her Kirby after she died and had no further use for it. No rush. Just staking my claim. When the time came, I announced to my brother as well that the Kirby was mine. He just shrugged. Perhaps he hadn't had my years of experience replacing worn out broken vacuum cleaners, one after the next, fighting to find room in the budget for each one. Each time it happened, I reminded my mom of how well her Kirby was holding up.

We got accustomed to a certain amount of litter on the carpets.

Once Mom died, at the ripe old age of 90, the Kirby stayed with my dad. There was still a need for vacuuming, and he had hired help to assist with the machine. And for those of you who wonder, NO, that had absolutely nothing to do with my taking him into our house for his final 2 1/2 years. Absolutely nothing!

Once Dad died, and Steve and I moved to Arizona, the Kirby came along in the moving truck. With the condition my knees were in, and the fact that by then most of our floors were uncarpeted and could be swept with a broom, the few rugs in the house were very infrequently vacuumed. The Fred fur coating them was a fairly even grey, and one could willfully ignore its accumulation. Until you couldn't anymore. Then the Kirby got dragged out and used.

Fred fur filled a bag fairly quickly. There were replacement bags aplenty, but somewhere along the line, that danged spring that held them in place got so tight, and my fingers lost enough strength, that the bags ripped each time they were changed. Then the belt, like all rubber finally must, discombobulated. I looked up Kirby stores in the area, but the nearest one, far as I could figure, was 30 miles away. I didn't feel like going there. Shopping on line, I managed to find them, but only in bags of ten. Oh well, a forever vacuum cleaner could use ten belts, right?

The problem was, over the intervening years, I had forgotten how to change one. Plus there was that aforementioned finger strength issue. They finally got themselves all straightened out, and suddenly the rugs showed colors we hadn't actually seen in years! Cool!

But then... last spring... there was a little square of hard plastic, the kind that, with opening and closing the top of a daily pill box over a couple of years, gets folded a few too many times and falls of, just so it can get lost on the floor. Somewhere on the rug. Under a chair. Right where the Kirby could suck it up, emit a partial minute of high pitched squeal, and manage, somehow, what over 50 years of use had not managed to do: kill the Kirby.

I changed the bag, since that needed doing anyway. I dug deep into memory and changed the belt, leaving 8 still in the bag hanging in the closet. I grabbed a good pliers (yes, I do actually have a good one. One. Plus a whole lot of others.) and worked it in between the roller and whatever, managing to pull the green plastic piece out, this time to throw it away forever! When I plugged the Kirby back in, it hummed. When I looked where I had been, big clumps of hair had been left behind. Turning it upside down, the roller refused to roll. Nothing was getting swept up.

Kaput.

Since it was spring and we were about to head back north, I just left the Kirby on the kitchen floor in a spot where we wouldn't trip over it while rushing stuff to the car.

Upon return, I looked one day when I had enough energy to examine it again, thinking maybe the fairies had visited over the summer, or maybe I'd just gotten smarter (equally likely), and discovered the Kirby had disappeared. Steve had thoughtfully put it away for me. I guess I had "forgotten" to tell him it was broken.

While Fred was no longer here to shed over everything, we were. There was an amazing amount of crap on the rug that we could no longer blame on the dog(s). Plus the old stuff was still there, along with the miraculous emergence of Fred fur from all the hiding places where it had been holing up during previous sweepings and vacuumings. That, or maybe I was actually right when I claimed the stuff multiplied all by itself without the need for a dog. Hadn't we been calling those clumps of fur "Fred Bunnies"?

It was time to head to the store and find something with a HEPA filter and get rid of all those allergens ... occasionally. The model we wanted was, of course, out of stock in the store. And I, of course, was out of patience. Upon returning home, I turned to my favorite online shopping-for-everything location, eBay. First thing I found, once HEPA was one of the search words, was the model from the store. Now $80 cheaper.

SOLD! Delivery guaranteed in two more days from now. Arrived yesterday.

I let it sit in its box inside the door. I knew what was coming.

Steve was all excited to see it, cutting open 77 feet of tape first thing this morning. Then there was the box fitting snugly inside the box with several other parts boxed, and those not boxed, bagged. Some both bagged and boxed.

I actually found that kinda reassuring.

Assembly, of course, was required.

I'm still not sure what language the instruction book was printed in, but once we flipped it over, we found English. (But why combine those two in particular?)

It had the usual warnings in it about not electrocuting yourself, just in case you can actually find the plug before you've read the rest of the manual. For those unacquainted with electricity, it explained that plugs come with a narrow and a wide prong these days, and it needs to be inserted into the holes in your outlet correspondingly. No, don't file down the wide side to fit. Go hire an electrician if you don't have a wide opening in your wall socket.

I wonder how many lawsuits prompted adding that bit of wisdom.

Next, blah blah blah, blah blah blah, here is your drawing and naming of the parts. We're already in trouble. It points to a tab "A", showing it in an empty space between two other parts. We can see how those two parts fit together, after all, they are the two parts of the handle (Duh), but look as we might, there is nothing either between them or on one end or another that could be remotely considered any kind of tab.

We decided to carry on, though it'll come back to haunt us, since other directions require locating and using this same Tab A. But the next directions required removing a Phillips head screw, inserting the smaller part inside the larger (though that is not how they described it), and reinserting the screw to hold both parts of the handle together.

Bet you think that would be easy, eh? This thing had the most cockamamie design since the axolotl, and after Steve fought with it for ten minutes, then handed it to me for the same, the task finally got accomplished. And please note, no Tab A showed itself at any time during this process.

After figuring out that we couldn't find a couple of pieces that needed to be inserted inside each other because they already came packed inside each other, and unlike the advertising that the HEPA filter was easily rinsed off between uses,  unless of course it was a HEPA filter which couldn't be rinsed but needed to be bought and replaced, which was probably why we couldn't figure out how to remove it for cleaning, we both decided we'd run out of patience with it for the day. Maybe two. Even three.

That's why the story doesn't end yet. The new vacuum is sitting in an infrequently used corner of the living room waiting for us to finish figuring out which parts of its assembly are still required.

And where Tab A is.