From time to time, my wife goes out of town to visit relatives or to go to a seminar or a conference of some kind. When she does, I am left at home entirely without any adult supervision, and this worries her a lot. She worries I won’t make the bed (which I don’t) or that I will forget to water her plants (which I sometimes do) or that I won’t dust properly (more on that later) or that I won’t clean up after myself in the kitchen. Now you have to understand that my wife can spot a dust mote from 50 feet and a microbe from 18 inches, so that even if I scour the kitchen (to my standards) a few days before she gets home, she will immediately go into a frenzy of cleaning because of how filthy (her words) I have left the place.
I guess I’m like most men who feel that if I wear a pair of socks for two days, probably no one will notice — and even if they do, they won’t say anything. As far as dusting is concerned, I discovered during my single days between marriages that after two weeks, the dust doesn’t get any thicker so dusting more frequently than every month or so is a huge waste of time.
I have now gotten to the point where I will scrub the kitchen to a point just short of repainting it but always leaving a few tell-tale areas of left-over spaghetti sauce, a coffee stain or a trace of a spilled beer that she will surely detect as soon as she gets within a quarter-mile of our house. That way she can be confident that all her suspicions were correct and that had she stayed just a few days longer, she would have found the Goleta health department parked in front with a crew of white-coated technicians taking staphlococci swabs while the police cordon off the area to prevent any neighborhood contamination disaster.
Of course, I do all this deliberately so that she will know that I love her and that she is needed and important to me.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. He can be reached at pburri@west.net.