The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves. – Logan Smith
When it comes to housework, everyone is different; though some people are either OK with all of it or hate all of it equally, most of us are OK with some tasks and despise others. For example, I’ve known people who will let the dishes pile up onto the counters before doing them, and others who whine if they don’t get “help” doing the laundry. Neither of those bothers me at all; in fact my attention to both of them might be considered by some to border on the obsessive. Though I have a dishwasher, I must wash every dish by hand before putting it in there, and it must be done before I go to bed; even if I’m about to drop from exhaustion (as I was while we were working on our house two weeks ago), every dish must be washed and the dishwasher started or I won’t be able to sleep. While preparing feasts, I wash dishes every time I get a break so as to keep the sink clear. And though laundry is only once per week, I have similarly-stringent procedures for it: all clothes are sorted by color and washed in a certain order determined partly by habit and partly by relative load size. Nobody else is allowed to interfere in the process, and previously-hidden dirty clothes dropped into the wrong color-pile after the process of washing starts are likely to result in the offending item being hurled at its owner, along with various terms of opprobrium.
But lest you think I’m some sort of paragon of domesticity, consider my bed-making (woefully inept when even attempted, which is rarely), dusting (hopelessly inadequate) and clutter management (the less said, the better); our new house incorporates design elements intended to make all of these dreadful chores as much less onerous as our current levels of technology and affluence allow. But of all the things which need to be done to make a living space livable, none of them are as awful to me as cleaning bathrooms, and no bathroom-cleaning chore is as repulsive as cleaning toilets. Part of my aversion is practical: the filth that needs to be removed from bathroom fixtures in general and toilets in particular is just nastier than that which needs to be removed from other rooms. But the worse part is a conditioned response: my early adolescence was plagued by week-long attacks of illness characterized by violent nausea, and to this very day the characteristic odor of even a clean toilet turns my stomach; whenever I have to perform the horrid task, I get it done as quickly as possible for fear of being sickened by the power of suggestion.
And that’s only my own toilet; the idea of having to scrub somebody else’s – or horror of horrors, a public one – is so utterly revolting that I would do almost anything else to survive before taking a job that required it. To me, cleaning public toilets is the most degrading, demeaning job imaginable, and the irrational part of my mind tells me that a woman would have to be completely desperate, perhaps even forced or coerced, to do it. If I were the sort of fanatic who believes it’s perfectly acceptable to force others to live according to my idiosyncratic feelings, I might even push for the profession of charwoman to be criminalized as intrinsically exploitative and degrading; in fact, I might even campaign for public bathrooms to be banned altogether on the grounds that as long as they exist, somebody will have to clean them. Oh, I know that some people say they don’t find it any worse than any other paid work, or even that they prefer it to the other jobs available to them. But obviously, they can’t be telling the truth if they disagree with me; because my ideas and feelings are the only right ones, anyone who says anything to the contrary is either lying or suffering from “false consciousness”. They might even be in the employ of the powerful janitorial industry! Did you know that 300,000 children in the US are forced into a life of toilet-cleaning every year? And that their average age is 13? It’s true! They have to clean 50 toilets an hour, and make $300,000 a year for their traffickers while they make nothing and have to sleep locked up in broom cupboards at night.
Of course, I’m not that kind of person. I realize that everyone has different likes and dislikes, different aversions and motivations, and different thresholds of disgust for different activities; I even recognize that it’s possible for other people to be perfectly comfortable with a job I would consider a form of torture, and vice-versa. But because many people are either unable or unwilling to understand this, it’s important that we take away everyone’s ability to inflict her own skewed weltanschauung upon others; though it’s impossible to make all people tolerant and accepting of differences, we can at least eradicate the processes by which fanatics force all of society to pretend that their own subjective feelings about various behaviors have some basis in objective reality.
I saw what you did there.
Very clever.
Research into sexbots will result in machines with the dexterity to clean toilets. Which will be rather unfortunate when humans are eliminated, because the sexbots can at least have sex with each other, but an existence cleaning a toilet that no one uses is just tragic.
Obviously the humane solution is to eliminate the demand for toilet cleaners by making it compulsory for anyone going out in public to wear an adult diaper.
Special police squads should be set up to randomly grope people in the crotch in order to confirm the presence of a diaper. Lack of a diaper would be proof of intent to victimise the poor toilet cleaners and be punished with the full weight of the law.
Although Diaper Possession in the 3rd will be punished by life imprisonment.
Excellent. I’ll be sure to link this post to anyone who spouts such nonsense.
When it comes to dirty toilets, shouldn’t we focus on “end demand”? After all, the kids can’t help it. It’s those evil exploiters who want to take dumps — sometimes even outside their own house. I propose that we name and shame those who use public toilets and create a national registry of those who have a port-a-John. These are horrible exploiters and we need to crack down on them.
Incidentally, your first paragraphs cracked me up. In my house, I’m obsessive about dishes. It drives my wife nuts sometimes. I’ll get up when a meal is done and start collecting and washing dishes. And NO ONE is allowed to pack the dish washer except because they do it wrong because they were clearly raised in a barn by farm animals and don’t understand that the plastic stuff needs to go on the upper rack and if you put the dishes in like that, they’ll rattle against each other. My wife, however, is the obsessive about laundry. When my mother was in town, I thought they were going to come to blows over it.
Hey, careful what you say about people on farms, after all Maggie lives on a farm and raises farm animals…
I like what you did there. 🙂
As far as household chores go, I am quite different. I tend to let things pile up and become a mess and then go crazy and clean it all up at once. Sort of like a pothead that switches to cocaine once every couple of weeks.
very clever, nicely put
I have the opposite reaction, in that I hate dirty toilets so much I do some cleaning on mine just about every day.
I’ve got to claim about one thing here. Exactly when did sex become such a dirty thing that no one would ever want to do it? It’s a perfectly natural activity that occurs throughout the animal kingdom. What’s become of this world we live in?
So…you’re not going to guest star on “Dirty Jobs”?
That is an EXCELLENT idea! So many people consider prostitution to be so dirty, so demeaning, so etc. that it’s a PERFECT subject for an ep of Dirty Jobs.
What people do to make a living is often a matter of what they CAN do, not what they WANT to do or SHOULD do, and is often governed by the sort of considerations that you cite in your column … one person would rather be an assassin than scrub toilets, another would much rather scrub toilets. I personally would like to be a idle rich person, but I’ve worked most of my life. And so it goes!
On my first submarine, as a “nub” there, I had to go and scrub down the walls of the #1 san tank (a.,k.a. “shit tank”). That’s cleaning toilets on steroids. Once I was in the tank, a shipmate motioned for me to come back to the hatch so he could pass me a … peanut butter sandwich … so I could enjoy it in the shit tank before I set about my task of cleaning.
This was great fun. 😀
Desk jobs? I hate ’em. I suppose they repulse me as much as cleaning toilets do for some people.
I’ve done desk jobs – lots of them. Being behind a desk reminds me of some bad memories …
I’m reminded of the times I sat behind a Navy manpower desk trying to figure out how in the hell to man the Navy with the PROPER mix of skills when Congress simply tracks “numbers of bodies” via “end strength”. A simple number of bodies is EASY to reach – but if the Navy were filled with 360,000 enlisted hospital corpsmen – and NOTHING else – how “ready” of a Navy would that be? Who would shoot the guns? Of course – it’s much harder to incentivize recruiting to recruit a “mix” of skills – than it is to simply fill the skills that are the most popular to the kids out there graduating high school each year. Everything takes the path of least resistance.
I’m reminded of the time I was informed that a whole Navy class of Yeomen (office administrators, basically) were written orders to fill SECURITY billets overseas because we did not have enough security personnel on the U.S. installations OCONUS. We guaranteed these guys when they enlisted that we’d make them Yeoman – well, I guess the promise was kept – we sent ’em to the school and gave them the Navy designation – and then we sent them off to be gate guards overseas.
Desk jobs remind me of all the times I sat behind a desk, frustrated, wanting to punch something but I couldn’t because, well – in desk jobs you just don’t do that.
Desk jobs remind me of Microsoft Project … yeah, fuck desk jobs.
You get the picture. Desk jobs remind me of a complete feeling of IMPOTENCE – of circumstances and situations I didn’t create nor did I have the power to do a damn thing about. Desk jobs remind me of being a “rubber stamp” for the policies of the “bosses”.
Give me a choice between taking a desk job – and being physically beaten by two 350 pound Samoans and I’ll choose the ass whipping every time.
I have Sailors who contact me through FaceBook all the time – and they tell me what an inspiration I was to them and how my example set their minds firm in the kind of Master Chief they wanted to be some day. And every time I get contacted I thank them … even though I’m thinking … “Really? All I can remember is FAILING this Sailor” – due to my inability to penetrate the bureacracy.
I have to be in an environment where I can see the product of my labor. I have to be able to IMPACT a situation – more than in just a tertiary fashion. I like working on teams that are forged by tangible things like SWEAT and survival.
I think all you desk workers HAVE TO BE coerced! No way you can tell me you enjoy that shit! 😛
Excellent comparison!
Maggie, you just made a bad career decision. If you’d gone the dom route you could have made money and never cleaned house again.
Hiring a maid is much cheaper.
I can see a maid doing a better job than some amateur who wants to be humiliated, but I don’t see her being cheaper than someone who pays you.
Cash is not the only way something can cost; emotional energy can be very expensive, and domination IMHO costs far too much of it per dollar made. That’s why I stopped doing it less than two years after becoming a hooker.
It is, however, a good (if fictional and funny) example of how things can be distasteful to one person and not to another. This woman apparently doesn’t like doing housework; the guys are not only willing to do it for free, but to actually PAY for the privilege. Nobody’s trafficked him into doing laundry.
As long as the cutie in leather keeps him entertained of course.
When it comes to cleaning, I just do what I’ve got to do.
If Laura and I ever live together, married or otherwise, I hope we can afford to hire maids often. Our housework styles are so very different, and neither of us is particularly good at it or likes it much.