26.0 Cleaning Effectiveness

    I bought three vacuums yesterday. The first was a rebuilt Eureka! from Big Lots. Unfortunately, they forgot to put in the assembly instructions. However, I could see that one of the screws had to go in just one place to fix the base part with the upright part. Unfortunaterly, it wouldn't fit. So back to Big Lots it went.
    At Kmart, I bought another Eureka!, the bottom of the line model this time. Printed on the base part, where it normally would say something like "Maximum 12 Amps" was "26.0 Cleaning Effectiveness." I'm afraid that I was so captivated by the aggressive meaninglessness of this statement that I had to buy the damned thing. It didn't occur to me until later that they might have left out "... Out Of 100.0" or maybe 1000.0. I also bought a Philips-head screwdriver, since you nearly always need those and apparently I had returned Dad's last time I borrowed it. But it wasn't necessary. It was the easiest assembly ever, but a total piece of crap. Basically a Dust Buster on a stick, it had a little cloth cup filter in the dust cup so I had to pick all the dirt and kitty hair out of the cloth. If I wanted to do that, I'd just clean the carpet by hand with a comb. So back it went.
    The third one was a Kenmore. It assembled neatly, thanks to the Philips-head, and worked well, though its dust cup isn't so amenable to giving up kitty hair either. The manual said that if it was hard to push, to turn the carpet height dial to the next higher setting. I did and it worked great. Which suggests that that was all I would have had to do with the vacuum I have already, and that I now have two working vacuums, one surplus to requirements. It also suggests that my carpet is growing. Creepy!