And now, Shiller looked as if he'd fought with the vacuum hose and lost, with the vacuum cleaner's nozzle stubbornly clinging to his pant leg, crumpling the pitiable fabric of his suit trousers.
Anna and Victor quickly rushed over to separate the two before Shiller finally managed to free himself. Turning around, Victor saw that Shiller wasn't wearing a suit jacket, just an ordinary shirt, just as he had said; he wore neither suspenders nor cufflinks, and indeed, his shirt was somewhat wrinkled.
But clearly, Shiller was in no mood to worry about that now, he probably explained to Victor and Anna what had happened.
It wasn't that Shiller didn't know how to use a vacuum cleaner, but the vacuum had many nozzles, and he was clueless about what area each was meant to clean since he'd never used them before.
Of course, one could guess that the larger nozzles were for the floor and the smaller ones for cracks based on their size, but there was also the issue of adjustable settings on the vacuum cleaner.
The vacuum cleaner Merkel had was the kind used for manor cleaning, a multifunctional all-in-one that could vacuum carpets and even dilute soil, simply by changing different filters.
Combining nozzles, settings, and filters, these three elements were by no means simpler than a mystical array. It was impossible for a first-time user to figure it out, other than by trial and error.
Shiller didn't often clean rooms, but he knew it was tiresome work; he should start by cleaning the couch to create a space for rest. That way, if he became tired while cleaning, he could sit down for a while.
So he picked out a nozzle that seemed capable of vacuuming leather sofas and, to be on the safe side, set it to a lower setting before he began dusting.
At first, it went smoothly, and he sucked up the surface dust off the couch, but the real cleaning concern was the crevices in the couch—that was the key point of vacuuming.
After some thought, Shiller sized up the crevices and switched to a smaller brush head, but he forgot to adjust the settings, resulting in disaster.
As everyone knows, the smaller the diameter of a tube that the same volume of air passes through in a given time, the stronger the impact and suction force produced. For that large nozzle Shiller had been using, the setting was indeed low, but for this smaller one, to exaggerate a bit, even if Ye Meng Jia De's scales came off, it would pluck them clean.
Shiller pressed the small nozzle into the crevice of the sofa, and then, he couldn't pull it off. He didn't dare to yank too hard for fear of damaging the couch, so after some thought, he decided to use the Gray Mist.
But let's not forget, the Gray Mist in its normal state is weaker than a vacuum cleaner. In the end, he did manage to pull off the nozzle, but the moment he did, the Gray Mist was almost sucked in completely.
Luckily, Shiller reacted promptly and returned to his original form, only to have his trouser leg sucked in instead.
This he dared not pull forcibly, since the fabric of his suit was much more valuable than the leather surface of the couch; he had no choice but to turn off the vacuum cleaner first. But because the machine was quite far away, he had to drag the nozzle and the pole behind him over to it, getting tangled up with the hose in the process, which made it seem as though he was being kidnapped by the vacuum cleaner.
Finally, having turned off the buzzing vacuum cleaner, Shiller sighed with relief and then looked at his pant leg with a tinge of heartache.
Although he had several similar suits, given his current financial situation, it was one suit less every time one was ruined.
"Are you okay?" Anna asked, supporting him. "You know, these large vacuum cleaners require training before use, how could your butler dare to leave this thing here with you?"
"He's gone back to Moscow," Shiller shook his hand and corrected himself, "I mean, he's gone back to England for some advanced butler training sessions."
Victor and the others were clearly used to Shiller's occasional nonsense. He stepped forward, lifted the stick in front of the vacuum cleaner, and said, "It's just an office cleaning, there's no need for an industrial vacuum cleaner, it's not like we're cleaning your manor. I'll have Nora bring a smaller one later, let's have lunch first."
Shiller was obviously still reluctant, so Victor had no choice but to say, "Alright, later on we can study it together. I guess it could be useful for cleaning the corridors and the reception area over there."
They all went to Anna's office, where Victor and Anna had agreed to help clean her space first, and then clean Victor's after Nora arrived, so the sofa and the table surface were cleared up for the three of them to rest.
Sitting on the sofa, Shiller heaved a deep sigh and Victor smiled, saying, "Doesn't resting after labor feel good?"
"No, not at all," Shiller denied, "It's dirty, tiring, and troublesome. I shouldn't have let my butler leave so early."
"Welcome to the world of ordinary people," Anna said, laughing. "I bet every single thing you encounter next will be no simpler than this, whether you are ordinary or not, we're all dealing with troubles of the same magnitude, just framed in larger or smaller scopes, with no change in difficulty."
"Look on the bright side," Victor said. "Just like Anna said, you dealing with a vacuum cleaner here is about as difficult as Bruce dealing with Congress, and he might even have it easier than you, since at least he deals with Congress often, while this is your first time using a large vacuum cleaner."
Shiller let out a sigh, not because he was sad about being unable to operate a machine, since he knew all he could do was screw in a light bulb; he was mainly thinking about that gigantic vacuum cleaner Stark had shown before.
He guessed that Stark had definitely been kidnapped by the vacuum cleaner more than once during his experiments.
"Seriously, the design of this thing is a bit outdated," Victor said. "I think in the future, people might combine the machine and the nozzle together."
"So are you supposed to carry the whole machine around for cleaning?"
"Maybe the machine could move on its own," Victor gestured and said. "Equipped with some sort of intelligent system, it could just clean the spots that need cleaning. Perhaps that's a direction for the future."
Victor was just speaking off the cuff, but Anna's eyes rolled as she said, "Wayne is swamped right now, which means no one's using the robotics and AI lab he built earlier. Maybe we could give it a go. I have programming experience, what about you?"
"Me?" Victor pointed to himself and said, "I'm a cryogenic scientist... at most a theoretical physicist. Mechanical engineering? I haven't got a clue!"
"But with all the construction going on in Gotham right now, I do think a good cleaning tool is essential," Shiller said. "These manual vacuum cleaners are just too hard to use. If we could develop a smarter one, there should be lots of people willing to pay for it."
"Alright, I'll go ask the professors at the engineering school," Victor said, slapping his thigh. "I guess they might be worrying about funding too."