The shih tzus and the vacuum cleaner
In today’s world we are invaded with advertising on the television and the computer and sales people on the phone.
We are enticed into buying lots of stuff we don’t need. Supermarkets target you with eye level items on shelves and sweet snacks and glossy magazines at the counter to ‘‘have you’’ on the way out.
Door to door salesmen are craftsmen and have a high success rate if they’re worth their salt.
The phone rings right on tea time because most people are home at that time - but it’s very annoying all the same.
Mega stores entice you at the doorway with cheap bargains, but in reality bargains are few and far between, it’s the accessibility and convenience that seems to draw customers in as time is of the essence in the hurried stressful world we’re living in.
Is it just me or is time speeding up? Everyone seems stressed and impatient. People seem to be burdened with the pressures of life.
But enough of that, we all need to take time to laugh a little.
A very funny incident happened when my brother in law Wayne’s mother Gladys was bailed up at the door one weekend by a rather smooth talking, hard sell salesman who eagerly talked her into a new and very expensive vacuum cleaner.
It cost what was a whopping $2500 back in the early 1980s.
What this vacuum cleaner couldn’t do wasn’t worth knowing. He described the quality of the product and its various fittings and gave her a trial run of its capabilities on the carpet.
She liked the fact it had metal parts which would last and a good selection of good quality brushes for on the end.
Gladys bought it of course and was very keen on her new vac and really put it through its paces.
However about two months into her new toy’s life it suddenly stopped sucking properly and she got very frustrated with it.
Now Gladys had a bit of a temper when she flared up and she finally got on the phone to the salesman and gave him a right royal bollocking using words that I’m sure would have stopped him in his tracks!
‘‘You’re no better than the Hindu fruiterer downtown’’, she yelled at him, (our local fruiterer Harshard Patel could sell the skin off a rice pudding).
Out the salesman came on the following Saturday afternoon, very puzzled, and fired up the vac. It was certainly labouring and with his hand over the end of the pipe nothing much was happening.
He scratched his head in disbelief and decided to take it outside and reverse the hose to ‘‘blow mode’’ to see if there was an obstruction of any sort.
It seemed to really rev up and build up pressure then suddenly an almighty blow out, like a small cannon going off and... voila! A streak of something long and chunky come flying out and everything cleared and it sounded good again.
What Gladys had failed to tell the salesman was that her two shih-tzu dogs lived upstairs in the house and had a bad habit of doing their business all through the house, especially upstairs, and Gladys was so impressed with her new vac’s performance that she was sucking it all up, like fleas out of the carpet.
It was far quicker than the brush and shovel, she later told me with a chuckle.
Gladys had tears of laughter in her eyes when she told me the story: ’’I felt so sorry for him, I had to apologise and make him a cup of tea, I saw him outside, he was dry retching in the garden, the poor beggar’’. Puke Ariki cares for more than 110,000 images in the Swainson/ Woods Collection that were generated by the New Plymouth based businesses, Swainson’s Studios and Bernard Woods Studio, between 1923 and 1997.
Many of the photographs are still unidentified. Technicians are hard at work digitising the entire collection. Check our efforts out online at If you can help identify this week’s photo, please phone the Taranaki Research Center, 06 759 6060, or email the team at images@npdc.govt.nz