Cars? Nah. Horses Are Much Better!

Ok, I’ve been trying to get to sleep since midnight, and considering it’s 4:30am now, I’d just about given up.

Typical, though. As soon as I get up, turn on the TV, and get something to drink…I suddenly feel exhausted. Maybe writing this will tire me out enough to sleep.

Anyway, as you know, there’s nothing on TV at this time of the morning, except for those awful infomercials. This latest one, the Oreck XL vacuum cleaner, the one that’s on now, always makes me laugh.

It’s a standard thing that when a new technology comes along, sellers of the old technology will go out of their way to try and convince us that there’s some big reason why the new technology doesn’t work.

Here’s the deal on this one:

There are new, much better vacuum cleaners out there. Most noticeably the Dyson. I used to have one in England. This thing is amazing, you don’t have to buy new bags for it, and it picks up like nothing you’ve ever seen. We actually vacuumed the carpet with our old vacuum cleaner, then ran the Dyson over the same carpet.

The carpet actually changed color, and the canister that holds the dust had to be emptied three times (and that thing has about a 3 gallon capacity).

Without wanting to come off like a corporate whore, trying to sell you one of these things, you have to admit, pulling 9 ‘gallons’ of dirt from a freshly vacuumed carpet is pretty damn amazing.

But what has Mr. Oreck got to say about this?

If he was like Jim Carrey in the film ‘Liar, Liar.’ He’d say:

“Well, my vacuum doesn’t pick up as well, has filters so it clogs, needs a new expensive bag every few weeks, and I can’t blatantly rip off the Dyson cleaners, because Mr. Dyson was too thorough patenting the new technology.”

What he actually said was:

“Bagless vacuums are crap, because when you empty the canister, all the dust goes back up into the air and into your house! Oh, and my vacuum is lighter, but the fact that you very rarely have to life a vacuum doesn’t count.”

He even goes to far as to turn on a ‘scientific’ black light to show the dust that emptying the canister spills everywhere. Apparently, his bags have all kinds of filters that stop this happening, and you’d be a fool to buy a bagless vacuum.

Erm, Mr. Oreck? Can I point a couple of things out to you?

One, you can actually take the canister off the vacuum, and empty it outside. A weird idea, I know! You also don’t have to empty the canister by turning it upside down a full three feet over the trash can, like the idiot does in the infomercial.

Two, if I have a vacuum that picks up much better than yours, even if it does put a small percentage of the dust back onto the floor, the majority of it goes into the trash can. Considering I vacuum every other day. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t make much difference.

Sorry, Mr. Oreck, the truth is that you’re vacuum is crappy, and we don’t want to be charged an arm and a leg every month or so for new bags.

Like I said, it makes me laugh. It’s the equivalent of saying a typewriter is better than a computer because it will save you cash on your energy bills, doesn’t have a monitor with glare that can hurt your eyes, and is 100% hacker-proof.