Adventures in Vacuming.

When Paul went to his photography workshop in Colorado, he met a guy who is on the Engineering Board at Virginia Tech. I talked to Pat (the guy) a lot at the end of the workshop banquet and he offered to give my resume to people he knew and I invited him to dinner. He's going to come to dinner tomorrow so I started deep cleaning yesterday.
While we were gone, the apartment started smelling a bit musty so I moved all of the living room furniture and sprinkled carpet freshener and waited for a while to start vacuuming. When I started to vacuum, I noticed that there was no suction and figured that the bag was just full. We didn't have any more bags here and needed to go to Walmart anyway because we had no food so we locked Regina in the bathroom and went shopping.
When we finally got home (after some extra errands added by our neighbor), I changed the bag and it still didn't work. The belt was broken. It was extremely frustrating. We called Kroger to avoid driving back to Christiansburg but they didn't have belts so we called Walmart- no reason to make a 20 mile trip for no reason.
The phone desk patched Paul's call in to housewares and he put it on speaker phone. The guy that picked up was really helpful and said he'd be right back after he checked if they had the certain number belt (five) and less than thirty seconds later another man picked up the phone.
To give you the best recount of the conversation I'll put it in transcript form:
Hillbilly: "Housewares."
Paul: "Oh, I've already been helped. Thanks though."
HB: "What do you need?"
Paul: "Well, I called about vacuum cleaner belts but there's already someone going to go look to find it for me."
HB: "We have vacuum cleaner belts."
Paul: "I know, he's just checking to see if you have the right one."
HB: "Who's he?"
Paul: "When I called, someone else picked up the phone and he's going to go get check for us."
HB: "This is the first time I've picked up the phone."
************ yes, that's right, this man believed that he was the only person in the store and that we were trying to trick him by telling him that we had talked to him before we talked to him************************
Paul: "Yes, but there's someone else helping us already."
HB: "I told you this is the first time I picked up the phone."
Paul: "Well can you look for it?"
HB: Heavy sigh.
Paul: It's a number five.
HB: "Fine. I'll put you on hold."

He hung up. Actually hung up. I called back twice and was put on hold for twenty minutes and then told that I had not been put on hold but she'd do the same thing for me again (this time there was ringing) but no one picked up and we ended up driving out there anyway and picking up the belt and leaving within five minutes. Totally ridiculous but nothing could compare to that absolutely bizarre conversation with that hillbilly guy from housewares.
Maybe you don't find that as weird as I did but whatever.
I'm going to go clean some more. I've been getting distracted easily, especially with Regina laying on the back of the couch staring out the window growling at the other puppies outside as if it were all her territory (she didn't like the walk much this morning, it was chilly- 55 degrees and refused to walk at all most of the way back).