Gremlin in repair shocker

Now you'll never guess what I did today. I mended the vacuum cleaner. Gremlins quite clearly do not repair things. They make them go wrong. They don't do it deliberately, but things go wrong in their presence, and if they try to mend them they go even more wrong.

But I hate dirty floors, so casting aside my gremlin mantle, I decided that the situation was now desperate. So desperate was I that I looked up the manual on the Internet, read the instructions, unscrewed the bottom of the vacuum cleaner (with a screwdriver), checked the belt and the agitator (which is not a revolutionary agent but a cylinder with some little brushes on it that picks up gunk from the floor). I could now convincingly claim that the appliance seemed to be in good working order, which is not something I can usually, if ever, claim. I removed a wodge of dust caught in the belt and tried it again.

It worked.

I carried it upstairs to hoover the upstairs and it still worked.

I tried it with the attachments and it worked even better.

Then I pressed the power button and it died. I felt a bit distraught. "After all this excellent and ungremlinacious repairing, the motor has failed," I thought.

I tried pressing the button a bit harder and it worked.

I lead a very exciting life.