Everyday Canvas

Weird, but maybe not the worst

Prompt: Write about the "Worst Visitor" who ever darkened your door.

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I never had any “worst visitor” as a house guest, to tell the truth. For me, the worst visitors would be the ones who would badmouth me or anything or anyone around me after all the care and attention I’ve given them. If such a person existed, I didn’t hear anyone telling me about him or her. So I assume my houseguests were all wonderful and decent people

I had, however, a very bad experience about three to four years ago, with vacuum-cleaner salesmen, well not exactly salesmen; they were more or less vacuum-cleaner demonstrators. This experience was so far out, I couldn’t make it up if I tried.

Here is how it went. One day, the doorbell rang. I looked through the peephole and I thought the man I saw was the new neighbor who had just moved in, as he looked like him in stature.

I opened the door. He was holding a case of plastic water bottles. He pumped them into my hands and said, “This is for you,” and shoving me, walked past me into the living room. By this time, I suspected that he wasn’t the neighbor and I felt fear, so I stood by the open door just in case. It was then that I saw the van by the mailbox, and a second man pulling out a machine.

When the second man with the machine arrived, I recognized that what he was carrying was a vacuum cleaner. This man was very polite, and he said he was a college student and the only thing they wanted to do was to demonstrate a new kind of vacuum cleaner, which also acted as an air cleaner and an alarm system if attached to a computer when its owner didn’t vacuum.

At this time, my hubby, who had to be doing whatever he was doing in the backyard, showed up, making me feel a bit better but annoyed at the same time for his usual way of catching on to things a little too late. He said, “All right, show it to us, although we don’t need one.”

Just then I looked into the living room and saw the first man throwing garbage--dust, hairs, torn papers, etc.--on the carpet. Oh, God!

While they were showing us how well the vacuum cleaner picked the stuff up, another car arrived with two other men who acted as if they were the bosses of the first two. They told the first man they were taking the van because it was needed elsewhere. The first man said it was fine if they brought it back in fifteen minutes.

Now we had two men in the house showing us the machine, two men with no vehicle if we were to order them out. I felt my husband stiffening, but he acted calm outwardly in his usual laid-back attitude. The weird thing was, the men said, they weren’t selling the machine but demonstrating it, as it would go on sale in six months and they wanted our opinion of it.

Well, fifteen minutes passed, and no van. The first man, the very talkative one, who seemed to be the trainer of the second man was coming up with weird ways of showing us what one could do with their machine, sweeping everything there was to sweep in the place.

Half an hour to forty-five minutes passed and still no van.

We were getting impatient. My husband said, “Please, leave now. We saw enough.”

“But there is one more thing,” the man said, rushing through the house to the bedroom door. “Do you ever vacuum your bed? There is an attachment for that.” My usually very calm husband was now getting livid. “No you can’t get in our bedroom,” Hubby said firmly.

Without waiting for another reply, the man barged into our bedroom and ripped the sheets off the bed and began vacuuming the mattress. The man acted as if he didn’t hear our objections on account of the machine noise.

Then, Hubby roared. “Leave this room, and please leave this house at once, or I’ll have to make a call you won’t like.”

His words made me fear even more, because in front of us, were two young muscular men in top shape versus us, two elderly people who could both fall down, even when faced with a slow breeze.

The second man said not to get excited and he’d make his friend leave, but first, we should give them enough time to make a phone call and let them wait for their van. Then he pulled the first man by the arm and talked to him, handing him his cellphone. Then he began packing up their stuff.

Soon the first man had finished talking on the cell and telling his boss that they needed the van as they had overextended their stay with us. From what I overheard, I gathered that his boss was using the van with his girlfriend.

Looking embarrassed, the second man pulled the first man out holding him by the arm and told us they’d wait outside on the driveway for the van as the weather was very nice. This was how they left the house. A few minutes later, from the kitchen window I saw the van pull up and watched them get into it.

One thing was, all through this, they never told us how much the vacuum cleaner cost, but asked me if I were to buy, how much did I think it would cost. They said it wasn’t in the market yet. In short, they weren’t selling.

After them, I gave away the case of water bottles, which I don’t like to drink water out of plastic bottles anyhow.

To this day, we haven’t found out what their true aim was. Sometimes we jokingly wonder if they were the FBI or CIA people raking the neighborhood for negative extra-curricular activity or maybe they were burglars checking out the area. Plus, I never came across in any store the kind of a vacuum cleaner they had showed us.

At the exact place where they said they were planning to establish their own store, a bit off our town, is a pizza store in a strip mall. Out of curiosity, we went and asked if they ever knew of a vacuum-cleaner shop around there somewhere. The owner said they had been in the same spot for decades and they had no plans to sell, ever, and they didn’t know or think that there ever was any appliance store and they never heard of one moving in anywhere in the vicinity, either.

Go figure!