Although the vacuum cleaner is a recent invention, cheating is not.
Now let’s look at things on the lighter side and I’ll tell you a story.
Often the advance notice can be a great help. When someone give you a heads-up don’t turn it down, Couple thousand years ago the Romans had chariot races and many of them held outside of Rome about couple days travel by horse or horse drawn carriage. These races drew thousands of people into the arena to watch them.
Romans liked to bet and gamble on sport events, much like people today in Las Vegas. Some of the less scrupulous and more daring guys traveled to the race site with a swallow in their bag.
They liked the swallow better than the pigeon because it flew low and in straight line. Unlike the pigeon, which fly high in a zigzag it is, an easier prays to the hawks.
These races were a joyful, noisy and often dangerous event. Rather similar to the Calgary Stampede today. The chariot was marked with a colour each chariot with a different one, yellow, blue, green and so on. When the race was finished, the guy with the swallow marked the bird’s leg with the same colour as the winning chariot and let the swallow loose. The bird is a good flyer and can gather speed up to 60 km/hour. Within hours the bird was in its nest back in Rome and the cohort would fetch it. Seeing the colour on the bird’s leg it was easy to win his bet and the money that came with it. If it happened today, would he buy a vacuum cleaner with his ill-gained money?