Vaccuum Surprise

Vacuums are one of my surprising areas of expertisse. I worked for 4 1/2 years during my college years on and off (mostly on) as a janitor. Part of that line of work involves knowing how to completely assemble and disassemble a vaccum in order to remove commercial-sized clogs. This knowledge has come in handy in my personal life a shocking number of times.
Segue to about 8 months ago. Our vacuum was on the fritz. Luis was pretty sure that it was because we had the wrong sized bag, so he spent about 2 months every weekend driving around to specialty vacuum maintenence stores searching for the correct bag. He ended up special ordering the bag from the Bissell manufacturing plant and making mulitiple trips to the store because it was backordered and then they sent the wrong size. It was crazy. Then my life fell apart for a while with the end of the school year and I stopped caring about the status of my carpet. I would still vacuum semi-regularly, but I kind of stopped caring so deeply about the fact that there were clearly issues with the machine. One of the nicest things about having dogs is that they eat literally every crumb of food that gets dropped on the ground anyway, so I figured that as long as there wasn't any gooey stains being formed then we were probably okay.
Then summer started and I declared a moritorium on housework. I did basic chores like laundry and dishes, but I decided that I needed a break from my life and part of that was any sort of real cleaning. I kind of just wiped down bathrooms instead of my usual aggressive attacking of stains. And I still didn't really care about the malfunctioning vacuum, despite the fact that it was getting to the point where it was regularly spitting things backwards onto my feet while vacuuming. Gross, I know, but it was just Lu and me all summer and we're pretty tidy people anyway, so I just kind of made do.
Well, this week marked the start of me returning to the real world and part of that involved doing some actual cleaning. Especially last weekend when Ana moved out, I kind of had to buckle down and clean out her room. It was medium scary how much dust was under the furniture.
I was kind of peeved that the vacuum wasn't pulling its weight in the sanitizing department, so I decided to employ my intensive knowledge of the inner workings of a vaccum and I pulled it apart.
Well, turns out he problem was never with the bag. As I was shaving off all the strings and hair from the roller bar, I noticed that the intake hole was literally a solid plug of carpet fibers and other mystery ingredients. I scraped it out with a wire hanger and then decided to explore the source of the blockage...
I opened up the main part of the suction tube and discovered.... drumroll please...
A large man's sock.
GROSS!!!
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I mean, I knew that the vacuum had lost suction, but I had no clue that it had lost ALL suction. My carpets haven't been cleaned for at least 8 months and I felt so gross that I vacuumed the entire house literally 5 times. I may be vacuuming daily for the next week because I just feel icky. But I'm glad I solved the mystery of the missing suction.
Here's the really messed up part. Most families, when such a situation arises, can look to one person as the culprit- the person in the family who would actually attempt to vacuum up a large man's sock and get away with it. In my family, it could be any one of at least 5 people. Yes. That is correct. Was it Mama' messing around and screwing with my appliances? Was it Ana cluelessly attempting to clean something up? Was it Andrei rushing through his chores so he could go outside and play as quickly as possible? Was Luis distracted while talking on the phone or just being generally too tall to notice what's going on with the floor? Was I distracted while trying to put out too many fires in other parts of the house? We'll never know...
I guess the real miracle is that we didn't burn out the motor.