Cat hair. The bane of my existence.

Cat hair exists in a gaseous form in my house. Cat hair drifts through the air until it comes into contact with a solid substance - usually some dark fabric that I'm wearing - at which point it clings with a tenacity that would make even my Chinese stalker proud.

That strand then acts as a sort of a beacon for other cat hair still floating around, and it all begins to swarm, like moths to a flame, towards its brother.

If I stay really quiet I can almost hear the tiny whump! whump! whump! of all that cat hair slamming into me every second of every minute of every day.

Today the repairman vacuumed approximately a gazillion cubic meters of cat hair from beneath my refrigerator. Enough hair that, if I were so inclined, and if I were an expert in such dark arts, I could conjure up a new cat for every man, woman, and child on Earth, and still have plenty left over for festive holiday decorations.

The repairman couldn't find anything else wrong. "You just had no air flow down there," he told me. "That meant that it took the ice forever to form, if it ever formed at all. You should vacuum under here about every three months."

So that's just great. More work for me, unless I can talk the girl that cleans my house into vacuuming under there for me.

Of course I won't know for sure that everything has been fixed until I see actual ice accumulating in the hopper.