Whooshing up dust only women can see - someone is going to win a Nobel Prize one day proving there are perception vessels in the woman eye that react to dust in a way that man eye perception vessels simply cannot - is one of housework's most wretched weaknesses. This is partly because the vacuum cleaner was designed by someone with a very small brain, and partly because dust is the most unimportant thing in the entire whole absolute gaping universe. Indeed, the World Health Organisation has defined dust as this for the past 47 years in succession. Look it up.
It is true bits of bread and jam, lolly wrappers and half-eaten salted peanuts are not things you want on a lounge carpet, but you can just whisk around picking these things up with your bare hands. Getting a vacuum cleaner out of a cupboard, excavating the suckless cord from its lair, affixing the right whooshing attachments, hauling the whole shebunkle around the house between furniture and through narrow doorways can take an eternity. And time is money.
There were more patents granted for vacuum cleaners between 1860 and 1910 than there are coiffed hairs on Peter Dunne's head, and they all came from men.
How ironic then that man has disowned this primitive misshapen engineering botchup, in favour of mere God-given hands.
Little more need be said about the tautologous uselesslessness of vacuum cleaners. Soon they will go the way of paper film cameras and theatre intervals. But in the meantime, let's just ignore them completely and turn our attention to the one aspect of housework that has driven pretty much every man I have known into a lockjawed I'm-not-doing-any-more-housework sulk: the oval-shaped fitted bedsheet that winds its metaphorical arms around the mattress. Which is not oval-shaped. Who on EARTH designed a sheet with no corners for a base that has four corners?
Wouldn't this be better as a shower cap for a gruesomely large head?
Google can't tell me. Can we blame Suzanne Paul AGAIN?
(note she is now hawking the Thin Lizzy bra not the Aah Bra, there is a story here somewhere). Whatever, money is clearly at the root of it.
Round sheets for round beds are much more expensive, so there is money in round. How much, I ponder in a rare moment of random thought, would the sheets have cost for Jayne Mansfield's heart-shaped bed?
My wife has just had a week in Christchurch. I leave housework until the day she is returning, as even a laboratory monkey numbed senseless by oxycontin knows you never do something twice if once is sufficient. So, eight hours of hard graft - three hours washing clothes and dishes, and five hours connecting the freshly washed elastic-edged bedsheet to the mattress. Yes it takes that long. You pick a point on the sheet and wrap it under one corner of the mattress, then heave the thing up one side and whang another bit down when the sheet is tight. Then you race down the other side of the bed pulling the sheet as tight as tight can be and put a third piece under a third corner. Now you just have to put the fourth bit under the fourth corner. But you only have half a sheet length left for a full length of mattress. How can this be?
Obviously, you started in the wrong spot. So you shout out a word that indicates displeasure, I generally use the work duck, and you start again in a different place. Same result. This goes on for five hours until by sheer chance the whole thing slots into place. Murphy has left the building.
The person who gave us this denizen of design dementia should be hung from the eyeballs over a raging fire. And probably then slapped hard on both cheeks.
Anything less would be a ducking disgrace.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
