Like a Laser on a Vacuum Cleaner

One of my favorite expressions, crude as it may sound, is “like teats on a boar hog.” It’s used when you’re talking about something that is completely useless. I mean, really. Why do male pigs…or male anything, have teats?

So today as I sit here writing, my wife is watching home shopping…and there it is. A laser on a vacuum cleaner. The concept goes like this – there’s a laser at floor level on the front of the machine that illuminates the dirt and debris on the floor with such precision that you can see it while you vacuum. “You won’t miss a thing with the Dyson V15 Detect.”

Only, does it really matter? Are we really so desperate to see every piece of dust so clearly that we’re willing to pay $700 for it? Can’t we just go back to the old days where if we ran a vacuum over a piece of floor, we could trust that the machine did its job and got most of the dirt?

I mean, if we missed a few specks of dust, does it make a difference? I’ve heard of the butterfly effect – where a butterfly flutters its wings on some part of the planet and it affects events a half a world away – but I don’t really believe that we have things of such wholesale insignificance running the cosmos that we’ve got to go out now and kill all the butterflies. Or suck up every last piece of dust. I’ll get it next time. Or the next. As long as I’m vacuuming anyway, it shouldn’t be a problem. The only problem I’d have is if I didn’t vacuum at all. And that’s a choice that comes with its own set of issues.

So yeah. A laser on a vacuum cleaner. It’s happened. And it’s as useless as teats on a boar hog.