So our toilets have been on the fritz for about six months-my husband who needs to carefully and methodically first make a decision that a plumber is a necessity in such a delicate situation- assured me he could jimmy rig them so that they’d function. Of course said jimmy rigging included shoving towels under said toilet tanks, having to on every occasion pick up the lid of a toilet tank and pull the nozzle up so that the tank would fill up. But I agreed because I felt confident my husband would take care of it. I should’ve realized that my husband, being the ever cerebral fella he is- would painstakingly take his sweet time to research, analyze and pick over every last bit of minutiae concerning each potential plumber before he hired one to take on this *massive* job.
Clearly I am being facetious- but there is something just so FRUSTRATING about being with someone who works at a snail’s pace when you work at that of a hare’s. Finally feeling I could NO LONGER lift that GD FORSAKEN toilet tank cover, I finally just took the bull by the horns and did the UNTHINKABLE, I called a plumber. And sure enough said plumber arrived and those toilets we agonized over – or more aptly my husband hemmed and hawed over who to call to entrust their safety to-were fixed in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
But here is where my problem comes in. So the plumber does his job- there’s LOTS o banging and then 20 minutes later a joyous noise can be heard- the sound of a flush… and no subsequent need to lift the toilet tank up. My husband comes home as the plumber is leaving and I tell him please clean up the bathroom, which the plumber- as all plumbers and workers do- left a filthy mess- bits and shards of metal littering the floor, a toilet seat covered in brown smudges and lots of rust peppered throughout. I would have done it myself , but alas I was already 20 minutes late to a meeting in Manhattan. So I entrusted this task to my husband.
Upon my return I enter the bathroom, and not a spec of dirt, nor shards of metal have been removed. I casually ask my husband what happened… why didn’t he clean the bathroom..to which he responds ” I don’t see any dirt”…Perhaps I am crazy??? Is it that men truly do not see the dirt, or do they just choose to ignore it. I also wonder if the plumber had been a woman, would she have left such a wreck of a mess behind her?
And yes I wonder how it is that I have managed to stay married to a man who has a completely different version of clean than I do and I wonder is this what those 26 year marriages break up over? Is it all these seemingly small and insignificant things which pile up year after year until they are a massive heap which covers everything and make it impossible to coexist in the same place?
BURNING questions people….
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
We’ve found it useful to use the term “camping clean” around here when we want to say something’s clean enough to use but not clean enough to pass a close inspection. As in, if we were camping, would we walk the 30 yards to the water spigot to wash this thing off, or simply wipe it on our pants and use it as is? This tends to solve many communication problems.
Yes, it’s true, and I know it seems insane, but some men really don’t see the dirt. Once when we were cleaning house together, my husband told me he had dusted the living room. I was quite pleased until I entered the living room and saw how dusty nearly every surface was. When I pointed it out to him, he could see it, but seemed very surprised. I asked him which parts he had dusted and he couldn’t quite remember. I believe he was sincere. He just doesn’t see everything I see. So if I am asking him to help me I will try (nicely, of course) to remind him what to look for and what parts of the room to focus on. That really does seem to help.
BTW, not all plumbers leave the work area dirty and messy. I expect them to clean up after themselves, and those I hire do just that, even if they don’t leave it as clean as I would. Leaving bits of metal and rust behind is completely unacceptable and a plumber who did that would not get another call from me.
That’s cool. A beautiful improvement would be to have “dynamic” default images, for example based on the nationality of the user (based on ip adress), on the number of posts, or whatever. But this shouldn’t be that much of a challenge.