These miracles of modern engineering are designed to scrub, wash, brush and vacuum the dirt from our streets to make our gutters sparkle like your grandmother's best china. They're like the Swiss Army Knife of cleaning machines. However, on closer inspection, these machines have another cleaning device in their repertoire: pedestrians.

Yes, that's right, we're all being unwittingly used and abused by these cunning contraptions. As they pass the average, unsuspecting, freshly showered, nicely pressed, coffee carrying, person on their way to work, the aggressive brushes whip up all of the dirt and grime from the road and unsociably hurl it in our direction. The disgusting dust and debris (from who knows what) is then gently deposited in our eyes, in our hair, on our clothes, up our nostrils, between our molars, and finally settle down in a warm soothing lung, or two. When you think about it, we, the worker bees, are actually collecting this pollen of poop and kindly distributing it around the city.

Now call me old fashioned, but if I had the choice to: a) eat the crap from the gutter; or b) leave the crap in the gutter, I'm unsurprisingly leaning towards option b). It's a shame I don't actually get a choice.

Apparently, there are 450 street sweeper machines in New York that sweep 47,400 scheduled routes covering 6,000 miles of roads. That's the equivalent of sweeping from New York to Los Angeles and back again, on a daily basis.

This is obviously quite remarkable, but when you think that NYC's population swells to over 15 million people on any given work day, these unscrupulous scrubbing vehicles have quite a hefty workforce to do their dirty work for them.

Surely someone out there can redesign these machines to make them less offensive to the tax paying public? What about Sir James Dyson, the sultan of suction, perhaps he could give it a go?

Well, I'd better go now, my dog s**t sandwich is getting cold... it's an acquired taste you know.