I Hesitantly Buy a Yacht Mop

I replace my pancake mop with a yacht mop, and a few surprising things happen | Female voice generated from ttsMP3.com

Transcript

So, the mop I bought a couple of weeks ago with a bucket and a wringer was one of those modern fancy-pants ones. I don’t mean it has wifi or some kind of alert system to inform me that things are getting a little dirty in the bathroom and now would be a good time to clean up. No. I mean that I don’t even know if you can technically call it a mop. Aren’t they by definition a stick with a bouquet of haphazard strands at the end for wiping the floor, strands of what used to look like thick string back in the days when a man was a man and a mop was a mop.

No strings on this one, or if they are they are all tucked into a little pad or tuffet, like a big thick pancake, where the idea I suppose is that you can really press hard on the dirt and get the floor cleaner. It’s other feature, it’s bragging right apparently, takes up half the top of the bucket. It’s a receptacle where you place the pancake, then release the brake on the handle of the mop, and then push the handle up and down, harder, harder, harder, like you are gay-curious and giving this three-foot mop handle  some manual pleasure is your first tentative step at self-discovery. The receptable spins, the mop pancake is now dry, and I’m blushing at my experimentation but the mop seems at least content. Good enthusiasm for a first-timer, it’s thinking, but you just need to work on your technique a little.

The problem is that the handle is made of cheap hollow plastic, and is affixed to the pancake in the cheapest, shoddiest way possible. One of the results of that is that when I’m pressing hard to get rid of that tomato sauce stain in the kitchen, the pancake kind of gives up on the job and so the end of the plastic handle ends up scraping against my floor. Hello, tomato-sauce stain for another fucking week.

So I go on a quest for a replacement mop, you know, one of those with the strands of cotton string or whatever it is or was. A mop. A mop mop. I manage to find one, not only inexpensive but with a wooden handle, and even with the stringy head of it wrapped in plastic, tight around the bottom, the neck, like the way the mafia dispenses with some of its informants. I grab it with more enthusiasm than a grown man should emit about a goddamn mop, but then I notice the wording on the mafia bag: it’s not a mop, it’s what they call a “yacht mop.” This is my first time seeing that term and so I wonder whether there’s something about how it’s manufactured that would make it another poor performer in my kitchen, but totally awesome if I owned a yacht. I did some quick research online—quick and online meaning the accuracy possibilities are in the low 10% range, and research not really being a suitable word, not living up to what professors are doing all around the world as they study their niches in the arts and sciences and social sciences.

It seems that the terminology has changed to conform to advances in mop technology (there’s a prof at a university in Missouri whose 1983 PhD thesis was on the history of the mop, and I read some of it but I am not sure how much because by the time I had woken up the TV had switched to screensaver mode). I’ll try to sum things up in a sentence or two. If you’re a Boomer, you’ll likely know what I’m talking about. If you’re Gen X, likely too, but it might depend on whether your family had money or not. If you’re a Millennial or Gen Z, I’d say likely not. You might have seen what was called a yacht mop in cartoons and memes, but likely not in your house (though maybe on your father’s yacht).

Anyhoo.

What was just called a mop in the 1960s and before that is what is called a yacht mop these days. The idea is to distinguish it from the typical mop that’s in your house now: you either replace the wet pad with every mopping, or it stays on for a few moppings and then you throw it in the washer and voila, new mop. The older ones, the ones that are called yacht mops now, have those strands of thick cotton strings attached to the handle with heavy-duty staples, or screws, or wire, or some other meant-to-be-permanent method. Because you don’t wash these, you wring them out like a caveman with your bare hands. Yeah. You accumulate some dirt, you dip the mop into the bucket of water which is gradually getting greyer, and you kneel down reverentially and roll the thing into a kind of baguette that you twist, one hand going one way and one going the opposite way. Jesus Christ, were we savages back then? How good an idea is it even from the point of view of careful skin care to take a dirty frilly rag, dip it in dirty water, and then try to twist it dry like you’re a contestant in some he-man contest or something? Instead, after I notice that the bathroom really could use a good cleaning, not only the floor but everywhere, I decide to give the yacht mop a try in a modern condo en-suite. I have primal irrational fears of highly unlikely scenarios. The mop handle just spontaneously cracks in half when the strands realize this is modern tile and not a deck being swabbed. My bathroom turns into a yacht, and how the fuck am I going to explain this to my landlord (well, I bought this yacht mop, but I didn’t realize …)? And other scenarios even more ridiculous.

The one about the handle cracking kind of sticks in my brain though, so while I’m mopping, using the bucket from the discarded pancake mop like some Frankenstein’s monster that I’ve created, I think of all the sailor terms I know and I spout them nervously as I mop. Aye, matey … There’s trouble on the poop deck … Anchors aweigh! And so on. The floor is looking better than it ever has! It’s both heartening and saddening when old technology provides a better outcome than the latest modern tech.

But.

Or maybe I should say: and also.

After I’ve admired my handiwork and taken some deep breaths of the bleachy aroma, I hear a ping. I check my cellphone even though it’s not a ping sound that I have set up for any of my notifications. Not surprisingly, the phone has nothing. I hear another ping, the same sound. And just like the horror movies where the terrifying realization is that the call is coming from inside the house, it becomes obvious to me that the ping is coming from inside the mop. I remain calm, do a little searching online, and discover to my surprise that in order to maintain some of the market share of mops, the yacht mop manufacturers have equipped each mop with both wifi and Bluetooth ability. The technology is apparently even beyond what might be installed in your house for your computer and TV and other devices. It’s the same fibre-optic glass cable but it’s flexible, not sensitive and prone to easy breakage.

I leave the wet mop lying on the bathroom floor like the corpse of an old white-haired man whose hair the funeral home neglects to trim because they mistakenly understood he was to be cremated. There’s a little green light blinking now down around where the wood meets the strands. I click it and, well, there’s no other way to say this simply, it talks.

“Hello, Wayne, and thank you for purchasing me. As you’ve realized by now, I can do much more than just keep your floors clean. I have a highly developed voice-to-text feature, much more accurate than anything on the phone market, and I can text for you, send email, and even search. And, no, no AI yet: if you’ve ever tried it you know that it’s not developed and dependable enough.”

I’m silent for five, ten, fifteen seconds. When I summon my courage, and realize that this is just a talking stick weighing at most three pounds soaking wet, which it still is now, the strands having caused a large puddle in the middle of the formerly pristine floor, the floor that got that way because of my scrubbing, wifi or no fucking wifi.

“Listen,” I say, “that’s all good I guess, but I’m going to watch the news now, and if you don’t have this mess cleaned up again in like a half-hour, I’m cracking you in half.”

I hear a lot of beeping as I close the bathroom door behind me. Then silence. And then the unmistakeable sound of water being soaked up.