Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

We've undertaken a real spring cleaning, such as we haven't done since we moved in here in 2011. Lisa in particular has been cleaning like crazy, including identifying stuff that we should have thrown out long ago but hadn't done because we had plenty of space. (Some of you may recall the church-turned-home in the song Alice's Restaurant. We're not quite that bad, but we've been lazy.

Today we got serious. Lisa has been vacuuming all of the carpets, and this afternoon I rented a Rug Doctor.

( Tackling the Carpets )

I called the Rug Doctor support line. They told us to do everything that we'd already done, which still did not work. They then agreed to let us return the unit, and gave us information on how to exchange it for another working unit. We cleaned everything up and headed back to Wal-Mart (that being the only place in Fernley that rents these things.) Once I got there, I had to call a different Rug Doctor support line. After about ten minutes, I got a support agent, to whom I gave the case number that the first agent gave us. She started working on it.

The Rug Doctor kiosk is automated, and contained three units. There were two other units in the unit, with a blank space from which I'd rented the first one. The agent took remote control of the kiosk (I could see it happening on the kiosk's screen) and opened the blank space, into which I put the non-working unit. Then she opened another space and I took that unit out. The one in the middle was apparently "quarantined" (i.e. non-working) like the one I returned. I was able to keep the hand-held unit on the same rental, and for good measure they extended the rental time until 11 PM Monday night instead of 11:59 AM. I told the people at Wal-Mart's customer service desk, where the kiosk is, that the remaining units are apparently broken, and went home.

The replacement unit's brush rotated properly. so we filled up the tank with hot water and the cleaning solution and went back to work. All was going well until several more hours went by and the main beater bar stopped again. Lisa finished the family room and hallway with the hand-held unit, which works, but is much slower and very tiring.

The living room isn't finished. Lisa hasn't figured out what we do next just yet. She may just spot clean the worst areas and then I will return the unit and tell Rug Doctor that they now have three broken units in their rental kiosk.

I think next time we'll just bite the bullet and spent the much larger amount of money to hire Stanley Steemer or a similar sort of steam-cleaning firm to come clean the carpets