Sometimes I am a lazy bitch take shortcuts. Some of those shortcuts drive my husband nuts.
- Refusing to use a laundry bin. I really have no idea why I am the way that I am. Is using a bin simpler, and more sanitary? Indeed it is. Do we have laundry bins, in our home, available for my use? Why, yes, yes we do. And still, I persist in loading my arms up with as much laundry as I possibly can hold and lugging the pile all the way across the house, dripping socks and tripping over the cat as I go.
- Washing the sheets without their little holder. My husband, weary of our bed linens turning into a wet-in-the-middle sheet burrito each time we washed them, bought a handy little tool to keep the sheets and comforter from eating each other. They work GREAT. But I find it less convenient to attach them to the sheets than to simply deal with the sheet burrito. This may be the thing that tips my husband over the edge, hard to say.
- Only doing half the towel replacement job. We have hand towels under our kitchen sink. Often, when I think to toss them in the laundry, I am doing fifteen other things and I forget, for a while, to replace them with new towels. The most frequent catalyst for remembering? My husband washes his hands and yelps, “There’s no towel!”
- Letting damp dishes air dry. Our dishwasher has a drying function, but still, sometimes the clean dishes have a little moisture on them. Mug bottoms, of course. How else do you know that the dishes are done if there isn’t a little crescent of water in the bottom of your mug? (This is how! My husband isn’t the only one with handy little tools.) The other primary culprit is the plastic lids of our food storage containers, but sometimes a pot or a strainer or a plastic cup will have a little beading of water. My husband removes each of these from the dishwasher separately, dries them on the dish towel that I have of course completely remembered to replace, and only once they are completely dry does he put them away. Not me. I give a little shake then toss ‘em in whatever drawer or cupboard they belong. Literally nothing bad has ever happened from taking this little shortcut.
- Not removing the lint after each load. Oh, good, we’re back in the laundry room. Why do I have so many laundry-related shortcuts? I DON’T IRON, EITHER. Okay, before you leap to the comments to warn me about dryer fires – my nightmare, seriously – I will assure you that I always, always clean the lint trap before I dry a load of laundry. I just do it before I dry things, rather than after. Sure, this sometimes mean my husband or child are cleaning out MY lint (although I do their laundry, too), but since I do the majority of the laundry in our household, I’m okay with that.
Turnabout, as they say, is fair play. Members of my family are not immune to laziness cutting corners. Here are a few of the things they do that drive me nuts.
- Leaving dishes “to soak.” Listen. LISTEN. I get it. Sometimes a dish benefits from a good soak in soapy water. (Although Dawn Powerwash cuts the soak time to five minutes, even for the most stuck-on grease and grime! I would accept any and all sponsorships, I love you, Dawn Powerwash!) But that dish should not be there the next day. Soaking returns diminish after about thirty minutes. Once in a great while, an overnight soak does seem to do the trick for a particularly obnoxious dish. But that is RARE and does not apply to, say, a bowl of oatmeal or a plate of melted marshmallow crust.
- Walking around a thing as though it were invisible. Things assemble, detritus collects. That’s just a part of being a modern human, I suppose. But things should not live forever in a location that should be temporary. A sweatshirt’s home is not on a kitchen barstool. A pair of discarded socks does not make pleasing decor for the couch. The laundry room counter is not the perfect spot for an empty takeout cup to take up residence. I am not immune to letting something sit for a good long while. I’ve had a giant Hefty bag full of Clothes to Donate on the floor of my office for weeks now because I want to take it to the place where I volunteer, but I haven’t volunteered there in a while and I feel guilty and I haven’t been able to come up with a couple of hours to go volunteer and also the place is realllllly out of the way so it’s not simple to just drop it off, so I just yesterday tucked the bag behind my office door so I don’t have to see its accusatory mug anymore. But when the effort required to deal with a thing is, like, throwing it in the trash or moving it into one’s bedroom? JUST DEAL WITH THE THING.
- Waiting to clean one’s beverage vessel. We all have our stainless steel coffee/tea mugs and our reusable water bottles and we use them. But when they need to be cleaned, they somehow end up congregating on my kitchen counters for days until the cleaning can be ignored no longer. Stanley carafes are not my idea of an appropriate knickknack.
Okay, your turn. Which of these shortcuts do you find most egregious? Also: I know you have shortcuts; time to spill.
