Electric plug for an old vacuum cleaner

We have this old antique vacuum cleaner - a Kirby from the 50's, made of some kind of metal, maybe aluminum, maybe cast iron. No, it's not rusting, and it doesn't weigh much, so it must be aluminum. Or steel. Or gray plastic cleverly made to look like aluminum.

This immortal workhorse of a machine has been efficiently vacuuming our floors for the 25 years we've been married, and for another 25 or 30 or more years before that.

It finally began having problems. It has those old fashioned two prong plugs that you shove into the electric socket, and when plugged in, it would only work if you jiggled the plug just right. My son-in-law showed me that each of the prongs is not really a single blade, but a sort of loop that allows it to make contact and yet compress if the slot is too tight. So he expanded the loop with a screwdriver, and it worked again - for a while.

But apparently, the metal - I guess it's copper or brass or gold - has grown soft in its old age, as have I, and the loops collapse almost instantly. It was time to replace the plug.

I didn't really want to do that. This old vacuum is an antique, and I hated to spoil its authenticity by replacing original equipment with a modern add-on. But if it was going to suck again, it had to be done. So I was off to Home Depot.

There I saw a range of replacement plugs, but none of them were the kind I remembered from my younger days. You remember, you just slipped off the little cardboard cover and loosened the screws and attached the wires, or "conductors" as the English say. I picked out one that had two screws you took out and you just shoved in the wires, or conductors.

I hated the moment, but I had to do the surgery: I severed the old plug from the 15 mile cord extending from the vacuum's handle. I had done the research - I knew that the white wire is neutral, and attaches to the wider of the two blades. I even confirmed this with my son-in-law via my cell phone. I was... ready.

I put the wire - excuse me, conductor - into the slot and turned the screw. The manufacturer's website assured me that that's all you have to do for a tight and easy installation. But as I screwed it in, I screwed it up. The parts inside the plastic twisted into a mess, and the plastic was pushed out of its place, and the wire fell out like promises at election time.

I unscrewed the screws, and tried again. Same thing. I thought maybe I had the wrong holes. There were several, after all, and I searched the website for maybe some little graphic of the wires going into this device. No luck. It was apparently so easy and so self-evident that I could not possibly mess this up. Yet I had.

This is the sort of thing that happens to me every time I try to do plumbing, or electric repair, or car repair. This is why I depend on friends who can do any of those three things. I am pretty good at finding the problem with a computer, and back in the day I could trouble shoot database programs with the best of them. But pipes, cars and electric plugs hate me, and live for the moment they can entice me into a repair job. They are essentially evil. I should have been a Luddite.

Today I will go back to Home Depot or Walmart or whatever is out there, and I will find one of those old fashioned plugs that you just loosen the screw, wrap a half loop of wire around it, and tighten. Anything more complicated is a communist plot.

And that's the shocking truth.