The Considerate Vacuum

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 polite attention. The moment the room goes quiet again, it starts up exactly where it left off, with no fuss whatsoever. It is, by every technical measure, the most courteous vacuum cleaner ever built, and it has made cleaning a living-room rug one of the longest jobs in the house.

Nobody asked for this, because vacuum cleaners are loud for a reason. The noise is the reason nobody talks to you while you are using one, and a large part of the appeal of hoovering is a socially acceptable twenty minutes of not being spoken to. The Considerate Vacuum takes that away. In its place, it offers a machine that treats every remark, every question and every cheerful “Grandpa, look!” as an instruction to stop immediately and listen.

What happens next was entirely predictable, and nobody predicted it. Households discovered that the vacuum is a perfect measure of how much a room talks. One rug, cleaned in a quiet house, takes eleven minutes. The same rug, with three people and a telephone in the room, has taken as long as two hours, and on one recorded occasion, during a family visit at Christmas, was never finished at all. The owner reports that the rug has since become a family legend.

The manufacturer has embraced this. Later models show a running total of interruptions on a small screen, which families report checking with the competitive interest normally reserved for a football score. One grandfather, pictured vacuuming beside the fire, says his granddaughter has worked out that saying “hello” every nine seconds will keep the machine silent indefinitely, and has made this her main hobby. The rug remains, at the time of writing, about one third clean.

Behind the joke is a very familiar household moment. Loud appliances such as vacuum cleaners, blenders and hairdryers tend to pause conversations whether we like it or not, and many people have found themselves shouting over a hoover or waiting for the noise to stop before finishing a sentence. Choosing between getting a chore done and talking to the people you live with is an everyday balancing act, and children in particular have no patience with waiting.

So the Considerate Vacuum is useless in the most charming way possible: it always chooses the conversation over the carpet. If you ever find yourself torn between finishing the hoovering and listening to someone who wants your attention, it might be worth taking the machine’s advice for once. Switch it off and listen. The dust will still be there in ten minutes. The small person waving from the sofa, eager to tell you something important, might not be.