What the Little Green Machine Learned

The Bissell Little Green arrived on a Tuesday in a box that took up half the mudroom. BW had ordered it after the dog came in from the yard looking like he'd been mining for coal. I assembled it—which meant I read the manual while the child watched and asked if machines could feel scared—and plugged it in next to the regular vacuum, which suddenly seemed like it had been doing a lot of lying about what it could handle.

For exactly three days, the Little Green was optimistic. It had a job. It had purpose. It had a cord and a hose and little wheels that actually gripped. I used it on the living room where the dog had redistributed the entire backyard across our carpet in what I can only describe as a mud mandate. The Little Green worked. Water came out brown. Brown water meant something was happening. The carpet looked almost grateful.

Then the child found it.

Not the machine itself—she found the clear water tank. The empty one. The one that goes in the back. She filled it with apple juice. Not to clean anything. Just to see what would happen. I discovered this when the living room started smelling like a juice box had made a deal with the devil and neither side was happy about it.

But the Little Green kept going. It's a machine. It doesn't judge. It doesn't ask questions about the sugar content of what's being pushed through its internal chambers. It just turns the valve and sprays and sucks and turns the valve again.

After that, I locked it in the garage. BW said that was smart. The dog tracked in more mud that weekend. The carpet looked at me with the eyes it would have if carpet could make eye contact, which thank God it cannot.

The Little Green sits next to the freezer now, still mostly clean, still mostly functional, still waiting for someone to need it again. The manual is in a drawer somewhere. The child has moved on to other projects—mostly involving things she finds in my tool cabinet that definitely weren't meant for her.

The regular vacuum is back to lying about what it can do. At least it doesn't have a reservoir that a seven-year-old can reach. At least it doesn't trust anything about this house or anyone in it. (Smart machine. Really smart.)

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