Suckered

Last week we were leaving the house to go skiing when a guy came to the front door trying to get us to have a carpet cleaning demonstration. Now I wasn’t the one that answered the door or this wouldn’t have happened. But as it was, Caroline was the one that answered the door and by coincidence, about 2 days earlier, Emily had decided to do some painting in her room … and of course got some paint on the carpet.

Caroline, seeing an opportunity arranged for them to come in and do a demonstration (they were only in the area for the weekend) when we got back from skiing.

So upon our return from skiing, these two guys came in, along with their spiffy looking vacuum cleaner to start giving us a demonstration of their product. It turned out to be a very impressive product (Can’t remember the name of it, but that’s really not the point).

But I of course was wary because they were door to door salesmen, I don’t own the house and really couldn’t be bothered listening to a sales pitch at 5pm on a Sunday afternoon. Besides, I’d been scarred once before by having to sit through 45 minutes of a cooking system demonstration that Caroline had organized (and then not got home in time for) so that we could get the 4 free steak knives they promised … but that’s another story.

Of course being Sunday night and being the time that it was, when they hadn’t finished the demonstration in the first hour and before they got to the real hard sell, Caroline had to go and start prepping dinner … leaving me to bear the brunt of the assault. Yay me. I listened and watched and let them run their spiel, agreeing that their product was impressive and that if I was in the market for a vacuum cleaner that I would indeed think there’s was worth buying.

They tried hard. They asked if we ever traveled or if we liked the idea of traveling. I pointed out to them that we’d only traveled half way around the world to be there for them to even speak to us, to which the guy replied, “Man you keep shooting me down!” And by golly I enjoyed it.

They kept trying to build an economic justification for the purchase of their product, asking how many times we thought we’d have to pay someone to clean the carpet, how much wear and tear it might save … blah blah blah, to which my response was,

“We don’t own the house and we’re only here for another 12 months (yeah, I lied) so I really don’t give a toss about the carpet.”

“Oh but what about your bond, surely you don’t want to lose that?”

“Actually the company owns the house and there is no bond.” Another shot for me.

Then he started going into the health aspects and kindly vacuumed Michael’s bed, just to show me all the dust mite carcasses and feces and stuff that my child was sleeping in, trying to show me that we were putting our lives at risk.

“One in six people get a respiratory problem from these things and there’s six of you in the house …”

“Yes, but none of us have and if you extend out our families and there’s still no problem, that one in six doesn’t quite hold up to well …” Bang.

I tried to cut him short to say that given we’d be leaving the country in 12 months, I wasn’t interested because the power is different and so it would be useless to me. He stated that they would happily record the machine for us, went through the life time warranty and of course threw in the free trip to Mexico.

I pointed out that when you have four kids, a free trip for 2 to Mexico is far from a free trip. Got him again.

The whole time that we’re doing this, his mate is down on his arse in Emily’s room applying spot remover to the carpet for us. Poor bastard.

I decided that things had gone far enough, I could smell dinner and I really just wanted them out of there. So I gave him a home truth. “The only reason that you’re in this house is because you happened to come here on a day when we had paint on the carpet and you said you’d get it out. I don’t want your vacuum cleaner.”

That of course launched the questions about why I wouldn’t buy a product that I had clearly agreed had benefits for us and was a quality product … did I really want those dust mite feces on the beds?

I told him I didn’t want to the vacuum cleaner. He rang the office and I overheard him at a complete loss as to why he couldn’t sell me this vacuum cleaner when I had agreed with him that it was a great product that I should probably have in my home. I took great delight from there in getting them out as quickly as I could, mystified as to why the couldn’t have my money.