I listened to this really great podcast, an inspiration to think of things in a new way – outside of the ‘this is how it is done because it has always been done this way box’; and an inspiration to figure things out instead of being stupid about how things work.

Armed with this inspiration, when the dog pooped in the house, I got out the high-tech carpet cleaner. It looks complicated, so up to now I have used old fashioned paper towels and cleaners – and then asked the hubby to properly clean when he was around.

Well, turns out that it is complicated. It took me a few tries to figure out how it works. Then I set out to clean the machine after the icky job. The meager instructions on the unit said to ‘remove the cleaning tool’ and then self-clean the hose through a separate port.

Well, I could not figure out how to remove the tool. I decided that maybe one button had to be pushed up to remove it. Instead, I quickly broke the piece in the process. Then I unscrewed a couple of screws to get it apart. That didn’t do the trick either and I think I further broke it in the process. To make matters worse, when I actually looked up the manual online, the picture of the ‘cleaning tool’ looks entirely different…with a nice little button to push to remove it. A button that does not appear on my unit.

So I was frustrated and it reiterated why I save these types of things for others more suited.

But what if my mindset were different from an early age? What if I had decades experience taking things apart and learning how they work? Would I be this frustrated?

Sometimes we create stories early on and do really well at making the morale come true. But maybe it isn’t too late to tell a different story. I could be the person that works to figure things out, with some compassion that it might mean braking more plastic thingies in the process.

It also gives me a new appreciation for how poorly this machine was designed – an appreciation in large part from the podcast linked to above.