Vacuum Cleaner Repair 101

... yup... one of the unexpected required skills of teaching. Well, maybe not for everyone. I'm one of those workaholics that actually manages my own room clean-up most of the time. I spent $150 of music department money on a decent vacuum cleaner last year. It works pretty well.... well, except up until Friday when it started getting uppity. I was a little pissed; it's WAY too new to be acting up. After looking it over, I deduced that there was some kind of blockage (which I prefer to a broken belt... my last vacuum cleaner made me an expert at dealing with that) and decided to put off trying to repair it until later.

When I finally looked at it closer (today)I found a huge clump of stuff at the base of the hose that required a partial disassemble-job to remove. The real fun came when I fired it up to see how much blockage I had cleared and the dang thing spewed a cloud of dust at me-point blank. Imagine every slapstick routine you've ever seen where some poor slob gets a face full of soot/engine smoke/dirt whatever and walks away looking like a blackface performer. That was me.

My T.A. stood by, highly amused by the whole thing.

After another twenty minutes, I realized that the real problem wasn't the blockage but the fact that the HEPA filter needed to be cleaned. So I took it outside and started whacking it against the side of the building, and I swear it seemed like I stood there for five minutes as more and more stuff kept coming out of it.

Well.... I'm sure you're thrilled about all this. I just decided to blog about it since I just finnished that little job ten minutes ago... I still have three periods to teach, and I'm basically a walking dust cloud.