The evilness that is a Rug Doctor.

Mood: Thoughtful and pensive

Listening to: I Alone (Live) and the beautiful silence that is one child in school and the other asleep.

Ah yes. Rug Doctor. I still see you sitting there in Stop and Shop with your shiny red mechanical innocence. “Rent me! You can have clean couches and rugs again!” you seem to radiate.

Never again will I fall for your promises of easy cleaning and fresh smelling couches and rugs. You sir, are much more trouble than you are worth! My couches smelled pretty musty, so I figured I’d rent one of you from Stop and Shop. It seemed much easier than buying a rug cleaner I didn’t need. To the customer service counter I went and rented you, buying soap and all. I wrestled you into my trunk and home I went, excited to clean said couches. I’m pretty sure this is a Stop and Shop policy, but you don’t even come with an upholstery brush or soap. The ladies behind the counter did not tell me that needs to be rented separately, resulting in my need to return to the store with two tired, cranky children and a tired, hungry, cranky husband. After all, you were only mine for 24 hours. It was bad enough hauling your bulky mechanical self out to the car and wrestling you into the trunk the first time. After that, your upholstery cleaner did not even work, in spite of several calls to a suspiciously mechanical sounding customer service representative that resulted in the first tidal flow of soapy water flooding the living room rug. Trip number 3 to Stop and Shop for a replacement upholstery brush only to find out that they all were marked broken – but just take this one and try it. Hmmm. Sneaky of you. Give me some amount of hope in this fiasco. After returning home, things really started going south. You did indeed spray soapy water all over my couches and half heartedly suck some of the dirty water back out. Unfortunately, this did not seem to remove any of the dirt or stains that were visible in the first place. So….more soapy water was sprayed and sucked out. The couches now looked halfway presentable, if still soaking wet. About this time, I was going to move you to the other room to clean another rug, only to notice another puddle on the rug, this one of epic proportions. Seriously, I don’t know how you managed to leak a soaking layer of water over HALF the rug while I used the upholstery tool. If I wanted epic puddles, rug doctor, I would have just gone out and gotten a large, un-potty trained dog. Thank heavens it was my rug and not a borrowed one that I was going to do next! I read the directions, I do believe water is supposed to go out one end or the other of you. Not both. Funny thing is, the more water I tried to suck out of the rug, the more you seemed to leak back onto the rug, even thought the dirty water was going into another tank specifically for dirty water. Maybe that was your game. Let’s recycle some of the dirty water into the wash tank and watch her brain explode as water keeps leaking! It took me a VERY long time to suck up all that water so that I didn’t have to worry about damaging the wood floor under said rug. It’s a very good thing you don’t have ears, my dear rug doctor, or they may have been burned off with some of the words I was screaming at you. At that point, I was done with you. Back into the trunk you were wrestled and then rolled back into the store without so much as a backward glance or a goodbye from me. Good riddance. Next time, I think washing things with Febreeze may not be the worst idea. At least I won’t be sucking water out of soaking wet rugs and couches for 3 hours.

Becky