A Carpet Saved
“I told her not to touch it. Then I got my hammer.”
A few years ago I got a call from a lady who was a regular customer. She had just put down in her place brand new carpets – ten days old – bone white rug. That night she was having a dinner party for ten or so people. One of the dishes she was famous for was French onion soup. So she had a big 2-gallon clay cooker full of French onion soup with about four pounds of cheese on it in the stove.
She didn’t know but some time ago her husband had dropped this thing (the clay cooker). The handle snapped clean off. In his wisdom, because it fit so perfectly, he took the handle got some clay glue, and glued it back on. He thought, “No one is going to know this.”
So she is carrying this huge clay pot to the table and the handle comes off in her hand and it turns turtle right on top of the carpet, face down, onto the brand new rug. She just snaps! She didn’t know her husband was responsible at the time, and of course he ran out to the garage to get the shop-vac when she started screaming. This was on December 23rd. The dinner party was set for eight o’clock that night.
She calls me and asks, “What do I do? Cheese is still boiling on the carpet!” I told her, “Don’t do anything with it. Grab a box. Cut a couple of holes in the top of the box, and turn it upside down so no one goes and steps in it, and leave it.”
When I got there, it was just a mass of molten cheese. I went in with a compound that froze the cheese down to like minus one hundred degrees Celsius. And then I took a hammer, and I just hit it, and it shattered into a million pieces. And I just vacuumed up the frozen cheese. Rather than trying to pick it out. You’d be there forever and a day and you’d never get it all.
Then I peeled up the carpet, and underneath was a big pool of onion soup in the under pad. I cleaned that up, cut out a big square of under pad, cleaned the back of the rug, cleaned the front of the rug, put a fan on it, and said “I’ll be back in an hour.” I went down to the van, got a big chunk of under pad and laid it down. Not a problem.
She was tickled. She had visions of having to tear up this really expensive carpet that was ten days old.
Done. Perfect. Carpet looked like new again.
-story submitted by one of our carpet cleaning technicans