Tuesday (Late Night) Debate: Carpeted or Bare Floors?

By Glenn and Jake

This week Glenn returns to the Tuesday debate. Normally this would be a time to raise the intellectual bar at OYIT and debate a hard-hitting issue like the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor ("Can a Latina woman truly understand the needs and burdens of white, rich, heterosexual, Christian men?") or the debate about if you possibly tell Nancy Pelosi you might do something, it means it's not illegal or wrong once you do it. Instead we're lowering the bar to floor level with a quixotic debate on whether carpeted or bare floors are better. Hopefully the universal appeal of this debate - after all, everyone has floors - will drive up our readership from the working class suburbs of Maryland and the southwestern region of Virginia. These are two areas of our great nation where the carpet vs. bare floors debate have ignited communities hotter than the Missouri-Kansas border war, which has now been trivialized into a sports rivalry. Carpeted floors will never be trivialized.



Jake: Carpet or bare floors: a question that one is faced with every time they build or completely refurbish a home. To me, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that carpet is the way to go. Carpeting is cool. It's softer than wood floors. Perhaps I am a bit more sensitive than most, leaving me with an intense hatred for non-carpeted floors. Although, I must say that a kitchen is one room that does not need carpet. I once had carpet in the kitchen of an apartment I rented and I dropped an egg on said floor covering. What a mess! Barring that one mishap, I cannot think of a single negative toward carpeting. Vacuuming is more fun than sweeping and mopping, by far. There are few things that I hate more than mopping. Perhaps Glenn loves mopping as much as he does ironing. Hopefully he will enlighten us on mopping. I'd like to end my first point by saying this: lying on a non-covered floor is uncomfortable, carpet is much better for laying. Thank you.

Glenn: Even more comfortable than carpet is a bed of pillows or, as many of us had in the 90s before the national water shortage, a waterbed. Should our floors be made of pillows? Water? Silly putty? While Jake's fantasy house may have floors such as these - so comfortable that you can't even walk upon them - I prefer bare floors. Whether tiled or hardwood, there is nothing more masculine than the sound of cowboy boots or tap shoes walking across a bare floor. The noise echoes down the hall like the screams of a Canadian family who comes back from a vacation to find their previously lovely home completely carpeted. If the sound of tap shoes on a hardwood floor is too masculine for our female readers, imagine instead the ease of sweeping a bare floor. With floors like these, there's no need to deal with your household vacuum or the disturbing things it's been whispering at you from the closet.

Jake: The only argument I've ever heard that is more ridiculous than the one you just presented is when I tried to argue, earlier today, that Matt Leblanc had two hit shows. Sure, cowboy boots might sound "masculine" but consider all of the manure dripping on your wood or tiled floors. Now imagine the hours you're going to spend on your knees literally scrubbing the shit out of the floor. I don't have to imagine such a scenario because I just lived it when I scrubbed my kitchen floor. This was the worst hour of my life, by far. Now, Glenn is going to walk around pretending that he actually is going to pick a broom up or sweep his floor, but we've all seen Glenn's old dorm room and we know that he's not going to pick anything up ever. He'd prefer to sleep on a pile of cheese Hot Pocket boxes as if they were a delightful cot. They aren't! There does happen to be cushoning under carpet, something that bare floors will never have. You may not want to lay upon the floor, but you're going to have to when your wife makes you sleep in the living room on the day you just had the couches cleaned. You probably shouldn't have said that her meatloaf was sub-par, and definitely shouldn't have said it in front of your neighbors.



Glenn: I will concede Jake's point - that perhaps, carpeting might make more sense if you've willingly entered the kind of marriage where your wife is the primary chef and you have to walk on pins and needles to avoid shaking her fragile emotional stability. However, my colleague Jake knows his own life situation: he cooks, Kaleena does not kick him out of bed for slight verbal transgressions and they aren't even married! So what is he doing advocating for carpet? I don't want to turn this debate into rich analogies about the presence of carpet and making relationships work, so let me digress. I wanted to wait until I had you on the ropes for this knockout punch, but I'll bring it out now anyway. If there's one thing I learned from the time Andy sold vacuums it's that selling vacuums is a despicable way to earn a living. If there's two things, the other is that most vacuums pick up less than 40% of dirt from carpeted floors. I was as shocked as you are when I first heard that - and not because I had just angrily stuck a fork in a electrical outlet at the though of such a mass deception being perpetrated on the households of our great nation. Carpet absorbs dirt and keeps it there for eternity. Sure you could purchase a Kirby vacuum for some outrageous price and Andy could get a 20% commission, but people don't do that. To keep carpeted floors is to keep the memory and presence of all dirt accumulated there during your fifteen year unhappy marriage.

Jake: I had a feeling deep down in my bowels that you were going to bring up the fact that bagged vacuum cleaners don't pick up a sufficient amount of dirt. Here's how I combat that fact: I have a bag-less vacuum that picks up a sufficient amount of dirt and dust. It's amazing how much dust is in my house, but what is even greater is how much of it is picked up by my $60 vacuum with a washable filter. This is obviously not a contest for who has the best vacuum, so I'll stop. The way carpet feels on my bare feet is very pleasant, as opposed to the cold feel of wood and tiled floors. I hate having cold feet, and not just about my impending wedding. Sure, you could buy slippers or wear socks all the time, but this is 2009 and do we really still have to live that way? I certainly hope not and I will not. Glenn also keeps skirting the most important issue: mopping. He is so eager to point out a vacuum's shortcomings, but what about a broom's? A broom will push dust and dirt back into the air, and if your child has asthma, that ain't gonna help.

Glenn: Maybe there's a middle ground here. Obviously Jake has found a benefactor in the vacuum industry, who I'm sure have made generous "donations" to his campaigns without the expectation of anything in return. This is not unlike how Evan Bayh operates in the US Senate with the banking industry. The middle ground eskews the politics of corruption and instead embraces the centrism of Evan Bayh: large carpeted rugs on otherwise hardwood floors. Most of us walk on as much of our available floor space as a vacuum collects dirt: somewhere around forty percent. If you prefer carpet, simply put rugs where you stand, sit and lie the most. That way people who are for and against carpet can coexist in the same house. Additionally, you can simply burn the rugs when, after collecting dirt for 100 years, they reek of such filth they would make Satan blush. Burning your own carpet, while possible, usually ends up in the destruction of your entire living space. Talk about cutting off your carpeted nose to spite your bare face!