What the Little Green Machine Learned About Loyalty

The Bissell Little Green Machine arrived on a Tuesday in a box that the child immediately claimed as a fort. BW had other plans for it. There was mud. There was always mud.

I unboxed it in the garage like it was something that mattered, which I guess it did. Compact. Green. The kind of thing that promises to fix problems without requiring you to actually fix anything yourself. It had a trigger. A water tank. A collection chamber. Everything a man living near Niagara Falls in a house with a dog and a seven-year-old needed.

For exactly four days, the Little Green Machine was loved.

BW used it on the hallway. On the living room corner where the dog had decided to be sick at 3 a.m. On the spot under the kitchen table where the child had spilled an entire box of markers and then tried to clean it up with apple juice. The machine performed. Sucked up the evidence. Made the carpet look like a carpet again instead of like something we'd found on the curb.

Then I used it.

Not on the carpet. On the Uber seat covers, which had gotten what I can only describe as a situation. The Little Green Machine didn't complain. It just worked. Sprayed. Sucked. Sprayed again. I felt like a man with a solution. (I was not a man with a solution.)

The child found it next.

She didn't ask permission. She just rolled it out to the driveway one afternoon and started spraying the concrete. Water everywhere. The trigger was fascinating to her. Push and release. Push and release. The collection chamber started to back up. The machine made a sound it was not designed to make.

BW found her there and calmly removed the machine from the child's hands the way you'd remove a loaded weapon from someone who'd never seen a loaded weapon before. No drama. Just done.

The Little Green Machine got wheeled back to the garage. It sits there now, next to the leaf blower I used twice and the shop vac that's somehow become a storage unit. The tank is still full. The trigger still works. But something changed. It realized, I think, that it was never going to be the answer to anything permanent. It would clean and clean and the mud would come back because the dog would keep being a dog and the child would keep being the child and I would keep driving people around the city who ate in my car and didn't think about it.

It's been six weeks. The hallway needs cleaning again.

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