The Little Green Machine Learns About Carpet

The Bissell Little Green Machine arrived in a box the size of a small submarine. BW had ordered it after the dog did something to the living room carpet that I'm still not entirely sure about. She said it was mud. I didn't ask follow-up questions. BW doesn't order things lightly.

I unboxed it in the garage. The machine was compact, genuinely cute in that plastic way things are cute when they're trying very hard to solve a problem. It had a bright green tank and a hose with a trigger handle that looked like it meant business. I read the instructions once. That was a mistake. There are approximately six hundred steps to operating a portable carpet cleaner, most of them involving water temperatures I didn't know existed.

The child discovered it three days later.

Not for cleaning. For something else entirely. She had decided the trigger handle was a gun and the carpet was a crime scene and the Little Green Machine was her partner. She named it Detective Suds. I found her in the hallway conducting an interrogation of the hallway carpet, spraying hot water and solution across a section that was already clean, making it less clean, which I didn't think was possible.

"The child, no—"

"Detective Suds says the stain is LYING," she announced.

By the time I reached her, the Little Green Machine had been repurposed as a weapon, a megaphone (the trigger made a satisfying squirt-whistle), and a microphone for singing a song she was composing called "Wet Floor, Wet Life." The carpet in question was no longer carpet. It was a science experiment.

BW appeared in the doorway. She took in the scene. The saturated hallway. The child still singing. The Little Green Machine still running, still spraying, still convinced it was doing meaningful work. BW picked up the machine, finished the job with actual technique, and that was that. She'd watched a YouTube video. Apparently there are people who know what they're doing with these things.

The Little Green Machine sits in the garage now. It gets used maybe once a month, always by BW, always efficiently, always leaving carpet drier and slightly less brown. It has no idea that for one afternoon it was something else entirely. It has no idea that the child still calls it Detective Suds when she walks past. It has no idea that the dog will track mud in again next week, and the week after that, because that's what dogs do, and that's why machines like this exist—not to solve the problem, but to cope with it repeatedly while pretending there's an endpoint.

The Little Green Machine is optimistic that way.

If you liked this story about the Bissell Little Green Machine Portable Carpet Cleaner, you can buy your own on Amazon. Remember, we're BFF if you do.