What the Pet Hair Eraser Learned

The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser arrived in a box the size of a toaster. BW unboxed it like it was going to change our lives. Maybe it was supposed to. It had cordless power. A motorized brush roll. A tank that supposedly held enough dog hair to choke a schnauzer. (We don't have a schnauzer. We have a golden retriever named Frank who sheds like he's being paid per follicle.)

I charged it. Hung it on the hook next to the car in the garage where BW said to hang it. The Eraser looked ready. Competent. Like a small soldier preparing for a war it had been designed to win.

Day one it worked exactly as advertised. I ran it over the back seat and watched the tank fill with a gray-brown cloud of Frank's entire existence. The Eraser hummed. Its brush roll spun. It knew what it was doing.

By day three I noticed something. The Eraser was being used constantly now. Not just by me. BW was running it over the seats in the morning before work. The child discovered it could reach under the cupholders. She found pet hair I didn't know we had.

By week two the thing had become a compulsion. BW started vacuuming preventatively. She'd vacuum the car, then vacuum it again two hours later because Frank had been outside. The Eraser's tank filled and emptied and filled again. Its cordless battery started getting only thirty minutes of charge instead of forty.

Last Tuesday the child took it to the basement and vacuumed the Ping-Pong table. Then the couch cushions. Then—and I found out about this through the sound of BW's very calm voice calling from upstairs—the lampshades.

The Eraser still works. It sits on the hook now and nobody touches it except me, and only when BW asks. I can see something different in how it hangs there. A heaviness that wasn't in the manual. Its plastic is slightly warped from being dropped. The brush roll has a permanent bend.

Frank is still shedding. The car seats are still full of hair by Thursday, no matter what the Eraser does on Monday. The thing was supposed to solve the problem. It solved the problem so well that BW started finding problems everywhere else that needed solving. The Eraser discovered that winning means losing the rest of your day to someone else's standards.

It sits on the hook. Charged. Waiting. It does not know that no one is really looking for pet hair anymore. They're just looking for something to do with their hands.

If you liked this story about the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Handheld Vacuum, you can buy your own on Amazon. Remember, we're BFF if you do.