The Considerate Vacuum
A vacuum cleaner that stops the instant anybody in the room begins to speak, so that it never once interrupts, and therefore never once finishes.
The engineering is genuinely good. A small microphone in the handle listens for the human voice and cuts the motor within a tenth of a second, so smoothly that the machine seems to be paying attention. The moment the room goes quiet it starts again, exactly where it left off, with no fuss at all.
Nobody asked for this, because vacuum cleaners are loud on purpose. The noise is the reason nobody talks to you while you are using one, and forty per cent of the appeal of vacuuming is a socially acceptable twenty minutes of not being spoken to. The Considerate Vacuum takes that away and replaces it with a machine that treats every remark as an instruction to stop.
What happens next is entirely predictable and nobody predicted it. Households discovered that the vacuum is a perfect measure of how much a room talks. One carpet, cleaned in a quiet house, takes eleven minutes. The same carpet with three people and a telephone in the room has taken as long as two hours, and on one recorded occasion was never finished at all.
The manufacturer has embraced this. Later models display the running total of interruptions on a small screen, which families report checking with the competitive interest normally reserved for a scoreboard.
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