They are the shattered. They are the broken. They are the victims of society’s indifference to ergonomic vacuum-cleaner design, sufferers of an epidemic of the condition known as “vac back”. These are their stories.

“One minute, I was a happy mother of two, vacuuming the floor of my three-bedroom ranch home in Florida City, Idaho,” says Shirley Knott of Florida City, Idaho. “Then I tried to maneuver my vacuum cleaner around the trapdoor hatch in my bathroom, and I felt a slight twinge in my back. It was sore for, like, four days. Maybe five.”

“Poorly-designed, hard-to-maneuver vacuum cleaners destroyed my health, my career, my life,” says Lee Burroughs of Interzonia, Delaware. “Of course, my $500-a-day heroin habit had something to do with it, too.”

“I thought I suffered from chronic depression,” says Laura Crawford of Shrubville, Texas. “I stayed in bed up to 20 hours a day, I had to force myself to eat to keep from starving, and I could not stop crying, even in the presence of adorable puppies. Then my husband bought me the Dyson DC15 ‘The Ball’ All-Floors Vacuum. Right away, I realized that my problem wasn’t a chemical imbalance in my brain – it was being married to the kind of selfish, lazy clod who thinks it’s OK to give his wife a vacuum cleaner for her birthday.”

The most heartbreaking thing about these tragic tales is that they could’ve been avoided with the Dyson DC15 “The Ball” All-Floors Vacuum. Sure, sure, it’s got all the power and ruthlessness dirt has come to expect from the fearsome Dyson empire. BUt wait! There’s more! The motor is mounted inside the titular “ball”. When it’s time to suck up the crud from those hard-to-reach corners, the ball tilts and pivots so your spine doesn’t have to. Bend, fold, and spindle the DC15 all you like – it won’t feel a thing. If Nadia Comaneci was a vacuum cleaner, she’d probably be this one, except for the part about being Romanian.

We could bore you to death with the DC15’s statistics, but we’ll just bore you into unconsciousness: 13.6-inch cleaning path! 37-foot telescopic wand with a 51-foot reach! Pre-motor filter captures particles down to 0.1 micron! 3d10 cleaning roll, with +3 against orc dander! But mere numbers can’t capture what makes the Dyson DC15 so special. We think longtime vac-back sufferer Vernon Averill of Yell Holler, North Carolina said it best:

“What am I supposed to say? Something about vacuum cleaners, you said, right? Am I getting paid for this?”

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