Smelly Old Vacuum

Today, my house smells like burned rubber.  A fact I hope Shaggy will overlook when he comes home.  But since he has a nose as sensitive as those French perfume sniffers, he’ll probably zero in on it immediately.  Might have been wise to burn a few candles.

Oh, well.  I’d have to come clean eventually.

I was vacuuming today.  It was a minor miracle that the floor was clear enough of toys to make that a possibility.

I had barely started when I noticed the lovely smell of burnt hair permeating the room.  Nice.  So I turned the vacuum over, grabbed the scissors and began cutting all the long hair that was wound tightly around the rotating brushes.  I can officially blame this problem on my girls, since I don’t have long hair at the moment.  Actually haven’t for several years.

Once I was finished and started vacuuming again, it seemed that the brushes were turning more easily and I no longer smelled quite so much burnt hair.  Good!  The problem was that the vacuum started making strange grinding noises.  Definitely not the kind of noise you want to hear from your vacuum.  And then, the lovely smell of burnt rubber started to fill the air.

I kept vacuuming for a minute just to make sure that I wasn’t imagining things.  No such luck.

So I turned the vacuum over again to see what the problem was.  There was a bunch of black goo which had formed on one side, near the end of one of the rotating blades.  It smelled terrible and was REALLY hot.

In all my years of vacuuming, I’ve never had a vacuum produce hot, smelly goo.  Don’t think that’s supposed to happen.

I decided to go ahead and remove the goo, and discovered, to my dismay, that there was a big chunk missing from the rotating blade.  Huh?!  Somehow, the blade itself was actually being melted by the vacuum.  Oh, wonderful.

So I did what any responsible person would do.  I stood the vacuum up and finished vacuuming.  As quickly as possible.  Doing my best to ignore the grinding sound.  And the smell.  Might be my last chance to use a vacuum for a while.