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Cleaning advances are not about saving time
(by Lauri Gross - March 11, 2011)
VITAL TRIFLE, BY LAURI GROSS
Cleaning advances are not about saving time
I am having a love-hate relationship with my new Swiffer cleaning products. Everyone in the Swiffer TV commercials looks so happy, except the old mops and brooms, which are sad to have been cast aside in favor of the new Swiffer replacements.
The Swiffer dusters and mops actually work as advertised, but here is why I sometimes hate them: They are so effective and easy to use that I feel I now must dust and clean my floors every day. But I am not surprised by this revolting development. I have seen it coming ever since I read somewhere about standard house-cleaning practices of old.
Back in the day (well, it must have been somebody's day), people took their area rugs out to clean once a year. Hang them up, beat them, shake them, return them to the family room or parlor or whatever they used to call it. Once a year!
Before that, in the days of Charles Dickens' England, people often kept a layer of straw on their dirt floors. When they dropped food or brushed food from the table, it just lodged in the straw and dirt. No cleaning required. Supposedly, this led to the term "dirt poor," because the wealthy tended to have floors of slate or something other than dirt -- but they were still covered in straw and food droppings.
Besides the fact that the average lifespan of a person living in these conditions was probably about 25 and the fact that it is just gross to think of living with that much filth, doesn't it also seem kind of swell -- even if just for a minute -- to imagine not having to clean so much?!
Even when I am not feeling nostalgic for our ancestors' hygiene habits, I still take offense at any company that calls its modern offerings "time saving." Because here's the thing: If people were still expected to clean their floors only once a year, and your choices were to drag your carpets outside and beat them or to use a modern vacuum cleaner, then, yes, the modern appliance is the time saver. But with each new advance in cleaning technology, somebody raised the bar of standards of cleanliness so homemakers were expected to clean more often and therefore spend more time cleaning!
Take clothing. People used to change their clothes, oh, I don't know, maybe a couple times a year. When people used a washboard at the river's edge, I can't imagine they did it very often. Now, sure we have incredibly efficient washing machines, but we also have closets full of clothes and find ourselves doing at least a load a day and, often, several loads a day. That's not saving anybody any time.
Now, back to Swiffer. Up till now, I was cleaning the old-fashioned way. In my kitchen, I would wipe the counters then sweep and/or vacuum the floor and then mop with a bucket of water and Mr. Clean. To dust, I used a long-handled feather duster for hard-to-reach spots and a rag sprayed with Pledge for everything else.
Then along came Swiffer. When I use my dry Swiffer floor-cleaner thingy on my wood or tile floors, I am astounded by the amount of dog hair and dust that I pick up. Then I use the Swiffer wet mop thingy, and I am astounded by the grunge I pick up. I do this several times a week and sometimes daily. How much can my dog shed? Where was all this dirt before I began finding it with my Swiffer cleaners?
Actually, I know where this dirt was before. In some cases, it was hiding in my carpet that I vacuumed every so often (we have replaced most of our carpet with wood or tile). Other times it was just lurking there, daring me to find it. Tile with the natural look of irregularly colored stone makes a beautiful floor, but the fact that it conceals dirt so well is a blessing and a curse. You know it's there, but unless you Swiffer it, you could pretend it wasn't. Now, there is no pretending.
This sham of time-saving devices isn't limited to cleaning products. Computers are guilty too. Remember when you typed a document for school or work and your boss or your teacher expected there to just be words on a page? Now, everything is so easy that everything we produce is expected to have graphics and photos and moving images and color-code charts and links and spread sheets. Has our time really been saved? Or has the bar just been raised again?
Before you conclude that I prefer low standards, that I detest progress and that I am a technophobe, let me set the record straight. I am all for advances that improve our standard of living, and I do support the concept of raising the bar as humanity proceeds through time, but it would be nice if we could all stop pretending that doing so saves time or actually makes anything any easier. Swiffer, I'm on to you!
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