strange encounter

Yesterday, I opened my vacuum cleaner for the first time in more than a year. Ever since I came to London, I been cleaning my apartment with the same vacuum bag. No surprise then that the bag had ballooned with dirt and dust, accumulated over many months, and threatened to burst at its seams. I threw it out, popped a new one in and, driven by a feeling of guilt over my neglect, cleaned the motor and exhaust filters.

This morning, I reassembled the contraption, eager to see what a difference a clean Hoover makes. Although I expected better performance, but I was not in the least ready for what would come. Were I to say that I was caught completely off guard, it would be a dramatic understatement. Let me relate.

The moment I flicked the switch and the vacuum roared to life, a black sock that a second ago had lain on the floor in perfect innocence turned into a wild beast. With the ferocity of a starving Rottweiler, it lunged at the brush head as if wanting to protect me from an deadly intruder, covering the fifty-centimeter gap between the two faster than my eyes could follow.

Of course, it was a sad case of self-overestimation on part of the sock. While a true hound dog would have sunk its teeth into the black tube touching the floor, the hapless sock was sucked into the vacuum much like into a black hole. It disappeared instantaneously and completely, and now it was quite audibly the vacuum that was ferocious. It had tasted blood and started to howl as if it craved more. My eyes wide in shock, I looked around me. What would be next? My carpet, my sofa, myself? It was then that I found the off switch and kicked life out of the mean machine, creating an appropriately post-apocalyptic silence in the process.

My heavy breathing the only sound, I surveyed the battlefield. My room was still intact, the walls hadn't bulged inward from the suction, and an annular patch of clean carpet surrounded the cleaning head, alien like crop circle in its field of dirty grey. The sock stuck deep inside the vacuum's main tube. With the help of some off-duty kitchen tools, I managed to retrieve it without doing much damage. After I had freed the floor of other loose object, the cleaning resumed without further incident, and my rooms are sparkling now.