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| An artist's depiction of what not going to be on time might look like |
As children, we all had chores in a weekly rotation. Someone had to clean the kitchen, which included cleaning all the surfaces and washing the dishes. Someone else would allegedly do the laundry, but I'm not exactly sure what that meant because our laundry was almost always in a huge unsorted pile and our socks were in an unsorted basket on the floor. Sometimes we would get a pile of clothes that were more or less ours on our beds. What doing the laundry meant was doing enough of my dad's laundry to keep him from yelling at us. He always had his shirts hung up and his pants ironed.
The other chores were taking out the garbage, which is easy except when you were almost murdered every time you had to take the garbage out at night because murderers always love to hang out by garbage cans in the dark. I hate That.
The last chore in the rotation was to clean the bathrooms, which was not that hard, we only had one. Well, that is not true my parents did add a second when I was about ten but you didn't have to clean that one because it was theirs and you weren't supposed to touch it.
I myself liked to use cleaning the kitchen as a weapon against the draconian bedtime policies around my house. The strategy went like this, I would try to play right up till nine o'clock and then "remember" I needed to do the dishes. I would proceed to extend that time ever further by going to the bathroom or remembering I needed to do something for homework. If I seemed to be lolly-gagging and prolonging the dish-washing to unreasonable lengths I would feign an indignant huff and say something like, 'Fine, I guess you just don't want me to clean the kitchen then.' If I had worked it right I would be up until 10 without actually ever doing the dishes.
One night while I was doing my dishes/stall plan my mom was walking out of the kitchen and as she did she slid a carving knife across the counter for me to wash. Somehow it hit the lip of the sink sprang vertically into the air and stuck between my thumb and forefinger. I pulled my hand out of the water showing her the knife, but because it was between my thumb and forefinger she thought I was doing the old classic thumb pinch fake knife through hand trick. Then the blood gushed out. I got to go to the emergency room and get stitches which means I didn't go to bed until 12:30 and had a cool story of how my mom stabbed me for trying to do the dishes.
I think we can all agree my plan worked flawlessly.
