Who vaccuums in your house?
It's sure as hell not me. I get bored half way through a room and try to mix it up by vaccuuming another room, find I'm out of cord, swear, plug it in somewhere else, pull til the cord comes out the socket, swear, knock the vacuum cleaner against the wall, swear, wonder why the vaccuum sucks the floor that hard, swear.
So Jamie vaccuums. He's better at it. I mop. I"m better at shouting that he's putting wet footprints on the floor after I mop despite putting the damn mop leaning against the entrance to the kitchen. We all have our crosses to bear.
But dammit, there's gotta be an easier way. A stick vacuum? Expensive and the batteries risk obsolence. A robot vaccuum cleaner? Sounds good in theory but I've heard they send dramatic text messages to your app saying they're stuck at the edge of a cliff a.k.a rug. And bloody hell, you have to sell a kidney to afford one of those happy little guys. And yeah, that obsolence - parts no longer available, batteries running out.
As I was doing my research, a.k.a asking my sister who is a research queen and my son who has one, I was joking that Jamie is my robot vacuum cleaner, though he's running out of charge and he's getting a bit old now. To complete the joke, I searched for 'vacuuming' in the gazillion photos I have in Google Photos.
To find my late father vacuuming the kitchen drawers, on the floor, as you do.
Why I took the photo is beyond me. Perhaps I was sending it to Jamie to prove how great my parents are at cleaning. I mean, who pulls out the kitchen drawers to vacuum them?. At best, I tip them on the floor and ~~my robot vaccum cleaner~~ Jamie comes along to vaccuum it up.
When I sent it to Mum, she replied with a little love heart emoji and the words my vacuum cleaner. ❤️ It felt a little early to cry, and I had some messing up the kitchen floor to do.
Maybe we'll stick to the corded old school vacuum cleaner. It tells a story, after all, of impatience, of the roles we play to keep the house under control, of how my Mum gifted us their old one years ago and it's still going, about what husbands and wives do and don't do for a tidy house, about parents and their obsessively clean floors and me sweeping the kitchen into the corner where the crumbs stay all week til Jamie vacuums on a Friday.
Maybe a vacuum cleaner is about humanness.
Maybe automation is overrated.
In a world of AI replacing human jobs, of smart fridges and smart cars and AI voice controlled assistants and chatbots and menu planners and AI carebots for your elderly parents and automatic watering systems for the garden you are working too hard to have time to pay attention to and everything else you can think of, I wonder a lot about what removing human labour does for human meaning.
We perhaps forget what's important when we dream of a life being made easier by automated labour - the work is part of our stories. The crumbs I leave in the corner, the cord tugged from the wall, the arguments about wet socks and laundry going stinky in the machine - isn't this the messy beauty of a life connected to others? A robo vacuum can't roll it's eyes at you, volunteer to do the cooking because you're not feeling well, listen to your day and care. It can't turn an ordinary moment, like vacuuming drawers, into one that makes you laugh and cry in the same breath.
Maybe we don't need automatons that diligently and professionally clean floors, but the living, flawed, infuriatingly messy humans who endlessly make messes on them.
With Love,
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