Carpet Caper

I am usually a very cautious person- quick to assume that something is too good to be true, something is a scam, someone is out to get me....well you get the picture. Apparently, all that good, cautious judgement was just completely thrown out the window yesterday about 1:00. I was innocently eating my lunch (a lean cuisine french bread pizza for anyone who is really bored and way too curious about my life), when I hear a way too loud knock on my door. I open it to find this way too friendly girl standing there. She starts talking really fast, and seemed to know me. She was so good at her job that I actually was trying to figure out how I knew this woman. While I was figuring this out, she basically shoved her way into my house. This is the point where she may or may not have actually used some sort of spell to completely suspend all normal thought in my head. You can be the judge - I am not SAYING that she said "imperio!" and waved a wand at me, but I definitely did something I would not normally ever do.

What did I do, you ask? Well, I agreed to let her team "clean the carpets in one room of my house for free simply for advertising purposes, no cost to me". Now, before I get the lecture on letting people into my home while my child was there... I kept my cell phone on and in my pocket at all times, kept Anna in my arms, and opened two separate escape routes just in case the carpet cleaner was a psycho and I had to run for my life. Also, I REALLY wanted my carpets cleaned! Here's where it gets fun.

Apparently, what I "misunderstood" (or was bewitched into believing- whichever) to be carpet cleaners, was actually a very nice young man, just home from Iraq (he was a very good salesman) trying to force me guilt me into talk me into buying a vacuum cleaner. Not just any vacuum cleaner- oh ho no- a kirby vacuum cleaner. That kid did things with a vacuum cleaner that I have not ever before seen nor do I ever expect to see again. He floated a golf ball in mid air, he pulled the dirt my home was built on, up through all the layers of wood, carpet pad and carpet and into the vacuum, he cleaned my mattress!, he had all kinds of extensions and brushes and a dizzying amount of little white and black filters so I could plain as day see all the nastiness that I and those I love have apparently been wallowing in all these years. After showing me what a nasty pig sty I inhabit, he nicely explained that all that dirt and grime was actually the fault of my VACUUM- my top of the line, what I used to think was expensive, Dyson vacuum. In fact, he put my vacuum in time out for being a bad vacuum and leaving all that nasty dirt and grime in my carpet to make my child sick. (I told you he was good.) After 3- that's right- 3 hours of demonstrating how my life will not ever be complete (or clean) again without this kirby vacuum, 306 filters of dirt, and telling me for the 8,031st time how inexpensively they can politely take my $2,000, he finally actually cleaned my living room carpets. I basically had to shove this guy, and his boss at one point, out of my house.

The sad thing is... I really want that vacuum.