Vacuum Salesman

On Good Friday I was treated to a free vacuum and shampooing of my carpet. At least that's what they told me. The door-to-door salespeople struck, yet another glorious perk to living in suburbia. *note sarcasm* I was assured that the only reason was because these hard-working, 9-month-employees (hey, I can make a baby in that amount of time; beat that!) were competing for a prize based on how many carpets they cleaned. blah blah blah. Sure, fine, you can clean my living room but I'm not buying anything and you have 45 minutes to get the heck outta here so I can fix dinner and make it to church.

They have a scripted sales pitch from which to work. I have a healthy store of sarcasm and no shame.

college-aged salesboy: Why, I see you have a Dyson. You paid a good $800 for that, didn't you?

Me: "My kid is outside playing in a cardboard box and feeding the infant dandelions, do we look like a family that pays that kind of ridiculous money for a vacuum? It's a rebuilt internet special."

Naive Kid: "You learned of it through a commercial, or..."

Me: "My brother says it cleans up after his big shedding monster of a dog, so we figured it might work alright for kids."

Smiling salesboy, changing direction: "Let me ask you, when you vacuum do you clean to get all the dirt up, most of the dirt up, or just some of the dirt up?" (what the heck kind of question is that?)

Me: "I'm usually pretty happy if I can't see anymore ground-up goldfish and cheerios."

Him, still trying: "Now when your vacuum breaks what do you plan to do?"

Me: "Stop cleaning altogether and teach the kids to eat the crumbs off the floor."

The poor guy gave up, did his little 5 minute demo, and then shampooed half of my carpet. My sister-in-law looked at the price and declared that if it did dishes and played with kids she'd buy 3. I would have been happy if it came with someone once a week to work it. As it was, my carpet was very thoroughly vacuumed and the kids were happily entertained while I made dinner. Not too bad, I say.