O O Ø O O O O
New Model Dog Hair
Many of my friends own dogs. As all pet owners know, dogs are fully vested members of the family. As such, they are automatically forgiven their foibles.
As one who grew up with—in order—a fish, a hamster, a replacement hamster, a turtle and a step-turtle, I don’t have the environmental immunities upon which all dog lovers depend.
Dog hair is the shiboleth that distinguishes dog owners from those of us that just like to say “Nice doggy. Down. Off! Off!” Dog hair is pervasive and migratory. While it starts happily anchored to the posterior of your best pal, it eventually makes its way across the carpet and laminate to find itself uniformly distributed across all manner of clothes, towels, furniture and belongings. Within scant hours of a dog being let into a house, its hair will have hopped a ride on the closest doghairferry (solar fleece) into a vehicle, on to colonize the far reaches of the planet.
Dog owners understand—along with slobber and the occasional tangle with doggy bile—it’s all part of the package. Dog hair is the badge.
Me? Not a fan, but that hardly matters because I don’t own a dog, and my wife’s allergies happily preclude the possibility. I don’t have to vacuum the stuff, or pick it off my jacket. I don’t have to floss it out of my food, or lint brush it out of my car’s upholstery. I don’t have to look at it when I pop the top off the shampoo…. You get the idea of what I think of its pervasiveness.
In short, I’ve always enjoyed living in a doghair-free house.
Then we bought this carpet:
For one weekend, living with a cheap, open-loop wool carpet was like having Marmaduke for a pet. If Marmaduke was undergoing chemotherapy.
At the end of the weekend I rolled up the carpet and stuffed it back into its plastic wrapper for return, while my wife patiently extracted the orange hairballs from our daughter’s fists and feet.
We spent the balance of the evening with Swiffa and upright in the—as all dog owners know—quixotic quest to eliminate the furballs from our floors.
I’m not so smug anymore.
Evan Spence
February 19, 2008
OOØOOOODCCCLXI
February 21st, 2008 at 12:00 am
Swiffa is sooooo 2003. We use Roombas now.