Open Writing

There is no ‘handyman cupboard’ in our house because there is no handyman in our family. Instead we have a handywoman and that would be me. I am all there is and as good as it gets around here, even though that doesn’t set the bar very high.

Let me explain. My husband is an accountant by training and so he is endowed with other useful skills such as paying bills and doing the tax. Now, with accountants everything and I mean everything, comes down to the bottom line. So, when repair jobs around the house prove beyond my limited capability, I dread telling him that we need to call a tradesman in because of course tradesmen cost money and usually vast amounts of it.

It was under these pressurised circumstances that I developed a surreptitious strategy for getting tradesmen to do jobs either for free or at considerably reduced rates. My husband is mightily impressed with my efforts but, at the same time, a little suspicious. “What exactly were you wearing?” he asked when yet another task had been completed without an invoice being produced. With this question he had hit on the crux of the matter but what I was wearing at the time was the exact opposite to what he had conjured up in his mind. Contrary to the saucy outfit he had envisaged, I was wearing my ‘you poor thing’ outfit. This outfit consists of an oversized shirt and baggy pants, both of which are covered in years’ worth of accumulated paint, grease and dirt stains overlaid with generous lashings of chlorine streaks and outright holes. As soon as tradesmen see me in this outfit they feel sorry for me and hey presto!

There is however a little more to it than that. Before the tradesmen arrive I go onto the internet and find out the correct terminology for the job at hand. This way the poor tradesmen are fooled into thinking that they are dealing with a woman who knows what she is talking about. For example, last week I was fixing the swimming pool and discovered that the parts I was having trouble with were called a spider gasket and a quick disconnect valve. In this instance I had decided to go to the pool shop to buy replacement parts and hopefully get the men there to take pity on me and tell me how to replace them myself thereby saving on call out and labour fees.

As I deliberately climbed into my infamous outfit I had a twinge of guilt at how brazen and conniving I had become. In my younger days I would never have entertained thoughts or hatched plans such as these. I lamented this fact to my son who instantly cleared my conscience by saying, “Oh get over it, Mum. What is the definition of a feminist anyway? It is merely a woman who has not yet learnt to use her femininity to her advantage.”