Has this happened to you?

My vacuum has been on the fritz for the past month or so, becoming less and less effective at grabbing the crumbs, crackers, popcorn and sock lint that frequently resides on my carpet. Then, the last two times I've used the vacuum (usually every other day) it has overheated and shut down after five minutes of hard work not picking up a thing. *sigh* So I told Ben and we looked online at some new vacuums, but they are so expensive for anything decent! There is a repair shop just up the road so I thought I would give it a try and see if fixing it would be cheaper than buying a new one. I dropped it off for a "tune-up" replacing belts, cleaning out all the hoses and pathways, etc. They called later that day and said it was ready so I ran up and they showed me this:



Apparently this was stuck inside the hose assembly somewhere and had slowly created a backup that eventually caused the vacuum to overheat! So it's as good as new and hopefully my personal repairmen (not sure which one to blame) will not try to fix my appliances again!