You may be asking yourself, why am I looking at a picture of two vacuum cleaners? The one on the left, the really old one (I don’t even know how old it is, 20 years, maybe more) actually works better than the one on the right, which is about 4 1/2 years old. I know this because Zale and I bought it a few months after we moved into our house.

The older one use to be kept upstairs (since I’m pretty lazy and didn’t want to lug a vacuum cleaner upstairs every time the bonus room needed to be vacuumed) and the newer one lived downstairs. This was when I thought it was the better of the two. What I discovered though, was that the newer one no longer picks up cat hair, while the older one yanks it up like it was never there. Here’s the problem, the older one doesn’t have attachments. I need the attachments. So now, we keep both downstairs, and the newer one is only used when I need the attachments.

What really aggravates me about this whole thing is that we did some research before buying the new one and it was actually recommended in Consumer Reports. Even after replacing the filter and belts on the newer one, the older vacuum still does a better job. There’s just something wrong with that!