Ever since she was small, my daughter, Clementine, and I have been engaged in a war of incompetence. Here’s how it works: whenever I ask her to perform a household chore, she makes sure to comply in the most ludicrously incompetent manner she can think of.
A request for her to make her bed might end up with all of the blankets wadded up beneath the mattress; emptying the dishwasher usually results in a massive search for dishes that can last well into the next week, with every meal becoming a sort of culinary scavenger hunt; and cleaning the toilet? Well, let’s just put it this way: your toothbrush needed replacing anyway, didn’t it?
For the most part, however, her tactics haven’t worked: the cycle of chore life continues on unabated. I assign the chore, Clementine does her best to not do her best, and I assign it again. This means that some chores need to be done over and over again, until finally they only achieve completion under direct and constant supervision. Frustrating? You bet.
The other day, though, there was a breakthrough on the chorefront of such magnitude that it just might possibly change the whole nature of chore assignments in my house forever. No, Clementine didn’t finally give up and just start doing the chores correctly the first time; on the contrary, she performed a chore in such a spectacularly incompetent manner that I am the one who is ready to admit defeat.
It all started with the bathroom. There are so many ways to screw up cleaning a bathroom (leaving the cleanser in the bathtub, so that the next person who takes a bath gets a nice, gritty crack full; cleaning the mirror with wet toilet paper, and then it leaving it there so that it adheres and dries in a sort of poor man’s papier-mache; even scrubbing out the sink with the toilet brush) that I was sure that there was nothing she could shock me with–after all, this was the same child who once used a wash cloth to clean the toilet, and then hung that same wash cloth back up in the shower to dry. (To this day I sniff anything I put anywhere near my face).
And so, thinking I was safe, I once again assigned her to clean the bathroom. Unfortunately, however, I had failed to take into account the fact that, as technology evolves, so do the ways to misuse it. In other words, I hadn’t reckoned on the Floor Mate.
A few months ago my mother got me one of those mopping vacuums, the kind that scrubs the floor and then sucks the dirty water back up. It’s great. It works like a charm. It’s so simple even a child can operate it–anybody else’s child, that is.
After filling the machine with solution and demonstrating the different settings (you need to flip a switch to go from wet to dry), my husband gave it to Clementine. Twenty minutes later she was back, pronouncing that she was “done–to the best of my abilities.” Not liking the ominous sound of that, my husband went to check her work, and found … nothing. The floor looked like it hadn’t been touched.
“Did you even use it?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” she replied angrily. “I’ve been using it for the last half hour–it doesn’t work.”
Thinking back, and remembering the distinct lack of noise coming from the bathroom, a lightbulb went on over his head. “Did you turn it on?”
“What?”
She had pushed the silent, non-functioning machine around the floor for the better part of twenty minutes.
It was at that point I gave up–it’s hard enough to clean a bathroom with a recalcitrant child standing in the middle of it; add in a husband who is prostrate from laughter, and it becomes nearly impossible.