Office Space

I am reminded of the movie Office Space, in particular the scene where the tired, angry office workers take the printer out to a field and destroy it utterly.  >Here< I was thinking about this because of my vacuum.  Note this isn't the vacuum Wendy got me as a present since that one is functional and fine, but rather one that we bought together years ago.  You see, this vacuum has been getting worse and worse over time as the motor wears out due to dealing with immense quantities of cat hair and long people hair.  The power of the vacuum was slowly and steadily going down to the point that I would drive it over some fluff and it just wouldn't pick it up.  Every time I would go to vacuum I would dread using the wretched machine.

I have this very powerful tendency to hold onto things until they really, really break.  This is true of clothes, tools, all kinds of things.  I don't keep broken things around when I have a good alternative but I dislike going and buying something new until I absolutely must.  Only this tendency had kept me from replacing the terrible vacuum for so long.  Yesterday I went out and bought a new vacuum.  As soon as I started it up I had a

Grunt, Grunt, MORE POWER!

moment, just like Tim Allen used to do in the show Tool Time.  The bloody thing blasted the pictures we have stuck to the fridge right off while I was vacuuming in the living room!  Of course, this is wonderful from a 'new power tool' kind of perspective but will be terrible in two weeks when things are back to the routine.  The new:

I now had the opportunity to go Office Space on this vacuum and crush it utterly for all the cursing, fuming, ranting moments it caused me over the past year or so.  Of course I don't have a convenient field nearby in which to smash this vacuum and I think cathartic destruction of objects is really best done in a crowd.  Best to minimize the chance of rationality taking hold and maximize the mob mentality that exults in destruction if I am going that route.  The vacuum cleaner afraid for its life:

Instead though I am going to give it away via Freecycle.  This is an idea and system I feel obliged to plug.  All you do is get signed up which is free and then you can send out emails to the group whenever you have things you want to give away.  You can set it up so you receive emails about things that other people have to give away or not.  Anyone can email you back asking for it and the person getting it has the responsibility to set up a time and place to take it away.  I have used this for old monitors and the less than successful Dr. Scholls massage pad and in both cases it worked perfectly.  People came and took away things I would otherwise have tossed in the garbage and were absolutely ecstatic to be getting them for free.  I even got a thank you email from the Dr. Scholls person telling me how therapeutic they were finding it and how their kids were having a ball.  This is such a great way to reduce consumption and reuse goods.

Of course I mentioned in the post that the vacuum is functional on floors and poor on carpets, so we will see if anyone jumps on the opportunity, they may not.  And if not I get the good feeling of trying to reuse along with the enjoyment of giving the infernal machine its comeuppance.  Of course, I wouldn't be a savage and smash it with a baseball bat, I have a much finer, more sophisticated tool in mind.