Saturday, November 23, 2024
33.0°F

Being friendly

by Barb Elvy Strate
| August 25, 2005 11:00 PM

On the cover of a recent issue of Modern Maturity it listed and article on Page 28 titled "User Friendly Tools for Home and Garden."

Being a person who is always on the lookout for anything that will ease my workload, I turned to Page 28 to find out about these friendly tools.

The vacuum cleaner pictured is classy. If it had a head one might mistake it for a willowy fashion model. It's slim lines in the color of thick cream appears light weight enough to be held in the dainty hands of any woman.

I like pictures. Actually I read the pictures before I read the words. The writer states that it resembles a Brancusi sculpture, a practical object pleasing and simple to use and lives in a broom closet.

Our model lives in a coat closet. We didn't allow a special place for our vacuum to reside when we built our house.

It's BIG.

It's HEAVY.

It's BLACK.

It's a FANTOM.

Unlike Miss Classy, it resembles a prop from the Star Wars series. A kid coming face to face with it in the gloomy corner of it's resting place would be scared spitless.

I've never thought of a vacuum cleaner as being friendly. Mine isn't. In fact it's downright unfriendly unless one can call its purr friendly as it gobbles the dust and dirt to churn in its canister.

Friendly to me is a greeting of "Good morning" or "How are you today?" Even "Have a nice day," which has worn thin, would be welcome.

My vacuum doesn't say any of these nice words. It winds its cord around my legs and eats everything in sight.

My husband remarked that it pulls dirt up through the floor from the lower level, which would be the reason for the satisfying purr.

The writer doesn't address the user-friendly hand garden tools pictured. Evidently, she doesn't get any joy out of digging in the dirt like me. I have a multitude of garden tools and none show any inclination of being user-friendly.

They don't jump from hooks on the carport wall and announce, "We're going to play in the dirt," when I enter their domain. They don't dance in a ring for sheer pleasure after I release them from their holding. User-friendly they are not.

Without my elbow grease behind them they are useless. So, what's all this hype about objects being friendly, I wonder.

I took a break from wondering about this and read some pictures in an edition of U.S. News.

A picture of a red car with an extension cord attached to the rear caught my eye (a fire engine red sporty car is a life-long wish yet to be fulfilled).

Low and behold, recently General Motors unveiled their environmentally correct Parallel Hybrid at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, and of all things, it's dubbed eco-friendly.

Move over user-friendly, eco-friendly is about to steal the page.