Print this out and hand to your XYL! It worked for me!

Clinks in the Vacuum
(A Low Pressure Article for Wives)
by Marlene Derfler as published in “73” Magazine Dec 1970

My husband is a builder. No, he doesn't build coffee tables or book shelves or breakfast nooks. Instead he builds important things like linear amplifiers, grid dippers, calibrators, and all those other things you need around the average home.

They say that Nature abhors a vacuum. Well, my husband does too. Most of the time l understand his drilling and pounding, his screams when he grabs the wrong end of a hot soldering iron, and the horrible whistle that wakes up the baby and indicates he is getting "zero beat." Our day of trial comes, however, when all too frequently it becomes necessary to vacuum the house.

We have a shaggy dog that sheds and you have to really keep after the clumps that surround him whenever he stops to scratch. This means toting out the vacuum nearly every day.

My part of the great vacuum debate comes when I start hearing the pings, clanks, and pows of "things" being sucked into my little vacuum's innards. It sounds disturbingly like bullets ricocheting among the rocks in a "B" western movie and it certainly can't be doing my vacuum any good. Investigation long ago showed these 'things" to be various little pieces of plastic stripped off the ends of wires, bits of wire, melted glops of solder, small nuts and bolts, and other little indescribable things of Ham Husband origin. We have agreed that he should keep his activities confined to the spare room that is his "shack," but these things come out on his shoes, follow like a dust storm in his wake, and I think roll out by themselves in the night. Once, when I shoved a handful of clinks" that I had gathered out of the vacuum bag under his nose, he peered at it, carefully picked out the little nuts and screws, and ran back to his shack mumbling something about precious hardware.

There is another side to the story to be sure. I usually just get the vacuum started and have suffered through the initial ten or twenty internal ricochets when he comes tearing out of that dark hole, often with headphones strung around his neck, striving to be heard over the combined noise of the vacuum motor and a sound like ball-bearing Ping Pong. After pulling the plug out of the wall (a move which someday may be fatal because he wired it himself), he finally gets across the point that my vacuum is making a horrible noise in his radio. I suppress the urge to ask him why he doesn't talk to this horrible noise just like he does to all the others and instead I ask the same question that I always ask him.

"Is there any way to cure our mutual noises without my giving up vacuuming and you giving up ham radio?" At the mention of the latter sacrilege he usually turns paler and retreats a few feet toward the comforting smell of burning solder. It is hard for him to turn any paler because the only sun he ever gets is when he works on antennas during the winter and at an occasional hamfest in the summer, but the burning solder smell is always around, normally then, we just stare at each other, both of us silently remembering the time he did try to do something about his noise. On that occasion he had grabbed up my vacuum and carried it off to his lair where he gutted it and added little round things to its insides with his ever-ready soldering iron. In a way he did temporarily solve both of our problems because when he plugged it in he blew the last fuse we had in the house. I wouldn't let him replace the fuse with a piece of solder, so he tramped out to the store muttering something about "ac working voltages."

I haven't let him touch my vacuum since of course, but I ask him the same question each time just to bring him back to his senses. He usually is torn for a moment or two, contemplating an ocean of dog hair on the one hand and a normal life on the others. Remembering that dog hair gets into the fan on his linear amplifier, he usually compromises at this point and says "QRX one. . ." I take the minute to pick up whatever bits and pieces and "things" I can see that he carried out with him on his last excursion. When I start vacuuming again after this mysterious ritual of "QRX" I know I'll be greeted by a sound worse than a trio of two-year-olds let loose to play with an the kitchen pots and pans.

All this that I have been telling you was true until just the other day. On that particular fateful day we had gone through our usual routine and I had asked him the usual question. This time to my amazement he said, "You know, sweetie, maybe you're right. I should spend more time with you instead of with my projects and radio. I could help you around the house. We could go out more, meet new people. I couldn't get much money for all that homebrew gear, but I could give it to somebody who could use it and then you wouldn't have any more clinks in your vacuum cleaner."

That day I was so happy! We closed the hamshack door and right then he started to help me around the house. The first thing he did to help was to shake out the rugs. The same eyes that can spot the latest transistor in a radio store window from a moving car at six hundred feet didn't see, my hand- washables hanging on the line upwind, but he was helping! The second thing he did to help was to put the dark things in the washer for me. He even included the skirt to my dark wool suit that was in the pile going to the cleaners. He said he wanted to make a full load.

That night we got a babysitter and went out to dinner. He paid ten dollars for our steak dinner, and then my reformed husband suggested that we go somewhere else for an after-dinner drink. Dazzled by all the attention, I happily agreed we had just got settled with our dollar-fifty after dinner drinks when who should pass by but his old high school girlfriend and her heavy-handed shifty-eyed husband.

After we had paid the babysitter her ransom and my husband was taking her home, I began to think. "It would be nice to have help with the housework, but the experience might take years off my life. What would he do when he found that doing chores together really isn't much fun? Would he go to the bar with the boys and maybe run into that floozie without her heavy-handed husband? The ham friends that come over-now are really quite polite, even when they are loaded down with all that stuff they carry in and out. At least now he's around if I need him. That smile on his face when he shows me his latest contraption does bring a lot of joy into the house . . ."

The next day we agreed that we should go into the hamshack together and start to clean it out. It was just by chance, of course, that I bumped against the receiver and turned it on. When that station came on calling CQ I was only curious when I asked, "Can he hear you as well as you hear him?" It was with a great deal of pleasure that I saw his eyes flash with an inner determination not to weaken, which died when, flooded out by the desire to get just one more signal report.

The smell of burning solder fills the air around our house The clinks in the vacuum cleaner are still there, but somehow they mean something different to me now than before. They mean I have a ham at home that loves me.
Marlene Derfler.

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