Contract autocrats, down w/ children & dirty laundry
Dear Rachel,
How does the entire building/construction/ home repair industrial complex survive with no regard for schedules, or communication, or showing up to work whatsoever? If I treated my clients the way contractors treat all other human beings, I’d be jobless, reference-less and a burden on society. Yet contractors can treat “9:00 a.m. tomorrow” to mean “sometime in the next calendar year” without repercussion. When do we revolt?
– Mad as Hell
Dear Contracted Disease,
This is so very painfully true. We all have an abusive relationship with skilled laborers because they know full well we cannot plumb our own toilets or wire our own wires. I once had a chimney sweep no-show because, and I quote, “Sonic’s happy hour was about to end.” What are we going to do, break up with them and go it alone? Until we return to living on the land – by which I mean literally eating dirt – we’re stuck.
– I’ll get to it ASAP, Rachel
Dear Rachel,
I am not a parent, but for some reason I keep getting clickbaits for Ranker lists of tweets by parents. These are not the uplifting “oh, my child born without hands just made their first finger painting” variety. More like the “my kids cry when they find out I’m cooking their dinner” collections. Is it acceptable for me to save these lists to hand to nosy people who ask me when I’m finally going to start a family?
– Not A Parent
Dear End of the Line,
I, too, am on a crusade to make it socially acceptable to hate children. There is no built-in excuse to choose not to reproduce. We can’t say we’re allergic to them like cats. Anything about valuing your own time, sanity, health and finances just sounds selfish. Maybe let’s turn these tweets into pamphlets. We’ll go on the offensive, passing them out door to door. Before long, people will go out of their way to avoid US, and we’ll have won our freedom from inquisition.
– Not kidding, Rachel
Dear Rachel,
My washing machine has a quick-wash setting, for which the timer says it will take 30 minutes. But it has never taken just 30 minutes. I started timing it because it seemed excessive. The record is 47 minutes, and the other record is 2.5 hours. I could wash my clothes with a toothbrush faster than that. How is this a quick wash? Is this a scam of some kind by Big Laundry? And if so, what do they get out of it?
– Dirty Laundry
Dear Spin Cycle Purgatory,
I dread to think how long your normal wash setting takes. Maybe it waits for you to get pregnant and have a child, and then raise the child to an age where they obtain the motor skills needed to wash your clothes for you. That seems complicated, however. A much simpler explanation is that a contractor programmed the timer function on the washing machine. It’ll get your clothes clean when it damn well feels like it.
– Air it out, Rachel
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