Friday, July 14, 2006

Sorry, No Sale

One of the downsides to telecommuting is that you’re home for the vacuum cleaner salesman. Yes, you read that correctly: vacuum cleaner salesman. You may have thought these people were jokes, that they didn’t really exist, that they were just figments of many, many comedians’ imaginations. Or even that I was making it up just now as a joke. I would like to bless you for your refreshing naïveté. About three days ago, I was just as naïve. Then I got the phone call.

The phone call was as deceptive as they come. A cheerful woman asked how I was doing and then told me my neighbor had suggested she call, because they were offering a coupon to clean the carpets (or floors) in two rooms of the house, and she had thought I might like to have this done. (My neighbor’s seen my house. She knew as well as I did how desperately my carpets needed cleaning.) All I had to hear was two rooms cleaned free, and I was ready to sign on the dotted line. The problem is, that was all I heard. Somehow, in my excitement over the fact that I wasn’t going to have to rent a carpet cleaner and clean them myself, I’d missed the fact that this was not a carpet cleaning business, hoping I’d see what a great job they did and want my whole house done. This was a vacuum cleaner business.

I’m not such a dummy that I would ever believe I could have the carpets in two large rooms cleaned completely free. I knew there was a catch. Bob and I take advantage of these sorts of “free deals” all the time. I mean, if you don’t mind spending an hour taking a tour of a time-share you’d never dream of buying (especially when you like to do things like test the reaction on the guy’s face when he asks you what your dream vacation is, and you say “an African safari.” Not too many time shares out there in the African jungle waiting to swap with "your" little condo on Cape Cod), you can get some pretty cool stuff, like a free weekend in Cape Cod or a helicopter ride in Hawai’i. However, I’m enough of a dummy not to realize this little carpet-cleaning steal was going to take up two hours of my time in the middle of the afternoon, the afternoon that I'd planned to devote to working on the first of five manuscripts I’m going to be receiving over the next two weeks that absolutely, positively have to get into our production department on time. I thought I’d let the carpet cleaner person in, work while the carpets were cleaned, sit through a fifteen minute spiel about how easy and inexpensively they could do all the floors in my house, tell them I didn’t need anything else done right now, and then get back to work.

Enter the kid who drove you nuts in grade school with all his stupid jokes and gimmicks, carrying his $2000 vacuum cleaner. (Again, you read that right. I didn’t accidentally type an extra 0.) He’s, of course, going to give it to me for a steal: $1500, if I agree to buy it right now, and he keeps calling his boss (and, I kid you not, he actually refers to him as “boss”) to get the price down, since I’m obviously not leaping at the chance to buy this thing. He’s also involved in some contest in which he’ll get to go to Cleveland if he sells the most vacuum cleaners in the next fifteen days, and he keeps telling me this. Cleveland! I mean, if he’d said an African Safari, or even Greece or something, I might have wanted to help him, but Cleveland? Meanwhile, he’s showing me just how filthy my house is, because I don’t have a vacuum cleaner worth a dime (none of this is anything he needed to tell me, and rather than making me want to buy this outrageously priced machine, I’m just getting more and more depressed over my horrible housekeeping skills, which are non-existent.)

Then, I realized the poor guy really had chosen the wrong house. I hate to clean. There’s no way he'd ever convince me (even if he looked like Adonis, promised to vacuum my whole house in his underwear, and would be able to go on an African safari with one lucky customer of his choice if he sold the most) to spend $1500 on something that would sit in my closet and make me feel guiltier than the Nordic Track I’d bought at a tag sale and never use. I could just imagine it smiling up from that “super strong titanium exterior,” so hopefully, wishing I’d use it not just quickly to vacuum a few rooms every other week or so, but also use it to vacuum up the dust mites in that filthy mattress its friend who sold it to me had shown me it was so good for doing, and to vacuum my ceilings and walls, and to clean the carpets more than once every five years, and to blow up air mattresses.

I absolutely did not need to be told that I should be vacuuming my mattress every week. And you know what? Since he used “the all-purpose cleaner” not the special stain remover, I still need to clean my carpet. He was ushered out the door, and I was stuck working till 8:00.

5 comments:

Rebecca H. said...

What a funny story! I hate cleaning too. It seems so pointless ... kind of, since everything gets dirty again so quickly. Sigh.

Emily Barton said...

Yes, you can finish cleaning the living room, start work on the kitchen, walk back into the living room, and discover dust has already begun to accumulate. No wonder so many homemakers turn to "uppers" for help! I prefer to just have my mother's philosophy, which was, "I'd rather have a happy family than drive everyone in it mad trying to keep a clean home."

litlove said...

I had exactly the same experience once - and the guy kept calling his boss in an attempt to force me to buy it. He took up the whole evening with his sales pitch. For me it was what they call 'a steep learning curve', I do believe.

mandarine said...

I like your mother's philosophy. I hope the quote is copyright-free.

Emily Barton said...

Mandarine, absolutley copyright free.