Sandy's Say: Half-Jobbers
...This is why Harry and his conspirators focus solely on the dishes in the sink and are selectively blind to all else in the kitchen. It is commonly referred to as ‘domestic blindness’ and it also accounts for the phenomenon where males cannot see what they are looking for even when it is directly in front of them in the cupboard. I have noticed however that they do seem to have an uncanny radar for finding biscuits, chocolates and beers no matter how carefully they are hidden...
The irrepressible Sandy James explains to peculiar yet predictable behaviour of the household male.
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“My Harry’s a half-jobber,” sighed my friend, Alison, “and it is slowly wearing me down.”
“What do you mean ‘a half-jobber’?” I enquired, as this was new terminology to me.
“Oh, you know, one of those people who announce in a loud voice that they will tackle a task or chore, so you mentally tick it off as done on your to-do list, only to find, when you inspect it later, that it has collapsed, relapsed or prolapsed.”
“Isn’t that slightly better than having a partner who makes no effort at all?” I ventured, for I quite like Harry. He is an affable, easy-going kind of fellow, always good for a laugh around the dinner table.
“No, not really because then, instead of just doing it yourself, you have to disentangle, disengage or disinfect it first before starting from scratch again and it takes double the time that it otherwise would have. When he tackles a chore it is not just temporary, it is fleeting and transient.”
“Give me some examples,” I suggested.
“Well, when he mows the lawn, he couldn’t be bothered to get out the whipper snipper and do the edges which means that I then have to find time to change into my gardening clothes and do it myself at a later date. Then he does not sweep up the grass clippings, they blow into the swimming pool and clog the filter so that I have to backwash it and empty the baskets.
"Last week he put up a garden shed but he was too lazy to come inside and get the adjustable spanner so he simply tightened the bolts by hand and surprise, surprise the shed blew down in the first stiff breeze. When he uses the leaf blower he blows the leaves into the street, doesn’t pick them up and they just blow back into the yard again. When he does the dishes he ignores the grill pan, soaks pots on the never never basis and fails to wipe down the bench tops, so I come down in the morning to an ants picnic and cockroaches swimming in a soapy soup.”
“Oh no,” I defended him, “that non-wiping of bench tops is a universal male trait. I used to think that it was peculiar to South African men who had been spoilt by their mothers and servants but it is in fact an international epidemic of gargantuan proportion. I have heard an attempt at explaining it by relating back to men being the hunters in our hunter-gatherer past. Apparently men tend to have tunnel vision which enables them to hone in on the prey, ignoring anything irrelevant in their peripheral vision. This is why Harry and his conspirators focus solely on the dishes in the sink and are selectively blind to all else in the kitchen. It is commonly referred to as ‘domestic blindness’ and it also accounts for the phenomenon where males cannot see what they are looking for even when it is directly in front of them in the cupboard. I have noticed however that they do seem to have an uncanny radar for finding biscuits, chocolates and beers no matter how carefully they are hidden.”
“Yes,” Alison replied, “but if I were so much as to rearrange one of his golf clubs, he would notice straight away.”
“That’s because he focuses on his golf clubs as a source of satisfaction or, in this analogy, the prey,” I explained.
“I suppose it all depends on your perspective,” lamented my battle weary friend.
“To me those damn golf clubs are not the prey. They are the opposition.”
