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A Man's Guide to Housework
by
John Gosselink
"We here at the Unsolicited and Possibly Dangerous Center of Advice have
come up with some helpful hints for homemaking for men. But before we start, let's
review the male philosophy to housekeeping. Remember, you are a guy, so you don't
sweat the details."
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Alfred. E.
Newmanlink |
As
the social and family structure of America changes, household responsibilities
have also evolved. With so many women entering the workforce, men have had to
take on more chores around the house. While this change isn't good or bad, but
just is, it is scary to men. Why? Because men don't have enough sense to be scared
of dangerous things like death, guns, power tools, or Amway salesmen. But they
run up against a soiled diaper or iron and they become a quivering pile of goo.
With this in mind, we here at the Unsolicited and Possibly Dangerous Center
of Advice have come up with some helpful hints for homemaking for men. But before
we start, let's review the male philosophy to housekeeping. Remember, you are
a guy, so you don't sweat the details. The wife may accuse you of purposely doing
a poor job so as to get out of doing chores, but that's just not the case. It's
just the house; it's not like your truck or chainsaw, so how clean does it have
to be? The ladies don't get this for some reason.
While women like the
white glove test for cleanliness, men use more of the casual glance approach.
It's dusk, the lights are off, you are walking through the room while reading
a fishing magazine, and you don't trip over anything. That meets the requirements
of a clean room for a man. See, it's not so scary.
One more thing. Please
don't share these hints with your wife. She'll just get all frowny at you and
then call my wife. You know how the ladies are with all their fussing about sanitation,
respectability, and rising above the animals stuff. Shoot, you'd think they'd
never blown their nose on the curtains the way they go on. But let's let them
have their little charade of cleaner-than-thou. This can be our little secret.
Kitchen hints:
- When
preparing food and something falls on the floor, you can still serve and/or eat
it depending on how long it's been on the floor and what type of food it was.
You can still serve dairy if you get it up in 3 seconds; breads, 5 seconds; meats,
if the dog hasn't licked it, 8 seconds, if the dog has, 6 seconds; cookies, up
to two weeks; vegetables, yeah right, like you're going to serve some vegetables.
Get some more meat
- When
doing the dishes, if it is a glass you drank water out of, just wipe the mouth
off with your shirt and put it back in the cabinet. The dishwasher uses WATER
to clean it anyway, so why not cut out the middle man
- Though
those sissy cleaning bottles warn you not to mix ammonia and bleach together,
it really does make mopping the floor much more fun. All of the noxious fumes
practically fumigate the kitchen for you, and when you start getting light headed
and hallucinating evil gnomes coming out of the pantry, it sucks the boredom right
out of the job.
Clothing hints:
- When
doing the laundry, don't worry about sorting by color. After a few washes, all
the clothes will be the same bland color. With everyone dressed the same, it will
make it easier to tell folks your family is actually a cult, then you can get
busy cloning yourself.
- When
trying to mate your socks and one is missing, the dryer didn't eat it nor did
sock elves steal it. You just dropped it somewhere. That lame "dryer ate my sock"
bit ceased to be funny after Erma Bombeck used it in 1972.
- Your
truck makes an excellent iron.
Childcare hints:
- Early
on, teach your children the letters "b," "e," and "r." That way, when you send
them to the fridge for a beer, they won't come back with one of the wife's diet
sodas, causing you to cuss like a sailor and send them back to try again, thus
cutting into your valuable beer drinking time as you wait.
- If
the wife is gone, the neighbors won't answer the door, and your female friends
are screening their calls and you are forced to change a soiled diaper, we recommend
a welder's mask, rubber gloves, tongs, a fire hose and a raging bon fire. Though
it's hard to see and takes longer, in the long run, you'll be glad you did.
- When
your kids have questions you don't know the answers to, just make something up.
Sure, their heads will be full of misinformation, but at least you don't lose
face. Let their high-paid, know-it-all teachers tell them that all trees aren't
called 'giant bonsais', a dog's barking isn't a corruption of Portuguese, and
that babies don't come from Idaho.
General Cleaning hints:
- After
doing a quick, male-like vacuuming, tell the wife you heard on the news that dust
bunnies have been declared an endangered species, cutting off her inevitable complaints
about your poor job.
- Cut
your dusting time in half by using your leaf blower.
- Make
picking up a game. Tell the kids you're going to time them to see who is the fastest
at picking up all their toys. Tell them the loser will be banished from the family
and forced to live under the Ben White / I-35 overpass, sharing a box with Leslie.
Watch those little tykes clean!
- Finally,
if it gets to be too big a chore, just give up, get 127 cats, and wait for the
health department to come condemn the place and then start over. Good times.
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©John Gosselink
February 17, 2004 |
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