Miracle Cleaners

I’ve ranted in the past about door-to-door salesmen that come around (those punky kids trying to play on our sympathies), but I’ve had a new type of salesmen come around quite often in the last few months, and I was blessed to get another one today. These new salesmen are older men selling a miracle cleaning fluid. I know this isn’t a “new” gimmick. I remember as a kid some guy coming around and cleaning the tires on my parents’ cars. Why he was trying to sell cleaning fluid to a kid – who knows! I was impressed, but I wasn’t about to spend my allowance on cleaners! Now that I’m an adult, I’m not sure how to take these peddlers of “miracles.”   

The salesmen always start by demonstrating the prowess of their solution on my front door window. This is the window that the dog slobbers on whenever we have visitors, that the kids press their faces against when looking into the front yard. Given the amount of fingerprint smudges just earlier today, getting the window cleaner doesn’t take much of a miracle. “Feel how smooth the glass is!” Yeah – it’s glass. It’s always smooth. While he was cleaning my window, he asked me if I’ve ever used Windex. “Of course,” I replied, as we all know my love of killing flies with Windex. He then started in on the evils of the popular glass cleaner. When I informed him that I stopped using Windex a long time ago in exchange for a vinegar & water solution, I think he realized he needed to beef up his sales pitch. So he began asking when we last cleaned our grout and bent down to demonstrate how filthy our grout must be. Ha ha ha – what a poor choice for this sucker, as my husband makes darn sure our grout is clean. Whether it is a pet-peeve of his, or whether he just likes using our awesome steam cleaner – who knows. But we have clean grout. Our entire house could be covered in slime and trash, but our grout would be clean thanks to Paul. So as this salesman was trying to clean a portion of our grout, I extolled the virtues of steam cleaning grout (no chemicals/etc) and how great our steam cleaner works on shower grime/etc as well. Needless to say, he was unable to get any dirt from our grout. He quickly summed up his sales pitch and didn’t even bother asking how many gallons I was ready to purchase. So I owe a big thank-you to Paul and his steam cleaner. You saved me a bit of hassle today and gave me a good laugh! And fyi, vinegar and water is nowhere as effective on flies as Windex. So I’m going to have to find another solution this summer – I should have asked this guy how his stuff works on the flying pests. A demonstration taking them out just might have swayed me!