Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site sjuvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!sjuvax!bbanerje From: bbanerje@sjuvax.UUCP (B. Banerjee) Newsgroups: net.jokes Subject: A Man's Guide to Housework Message-ID: <547@sjuvax.UUCP> Date: Sun, 14-Oct-84 19:26:41 EDT Article-I.D.: sjuvax.547 Posted: Sun Oct 14 19:26:41 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 15-Oct-84 02:01:57 EDT Distribution: net Organization: Saint Josephs Univ. Phila., Pa. Lines: 159 The following article appeared on August 26th in the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Supplement. At the time, I clipped it, and promptly misplaced it. Today, while cleaning up my apartment, I stumbled across it, and promptly broke up. The article was written by Clint Collins, and is reproduced without permission. --------------------------------------------------------------- The trouble with the sexual revolution is that the women are getting all the help and sympathy. They have entire books and magazines that do nothing but teach them how to tell the difference between a senior vice president and an executive vice president, and all the other skills necessary for an exciting, satisfying career in business. Meanwhile, men are back home doing the housework, wandering about in a state of deep stress because no one has told them which attachment to use to vacuum the bathtub. Up until now. The book I'm working on, "A Man's guide to Housework", for the first time lays out in simple language the arcane feminine lore men need in order to keep house as successfully as any woman. What follows is just a sample. _T_h_e _M_e_n_t_o_r_e_s_s The advice most frequently given women entering the unfamiliar masculine world of business is "Find a mentor". The mentor is some experienced man, higher in the company, who will take you on as a protegee. The women who give other women this advice claim that men do the same thing all the time. That's true, only men don't call it "finding a mentor." They call it "buttering up the right person." All of which is simply preface to the first step that a man should take upon himself upon entering the feminine world of housework. Find an experienced woman in the neigh- borhood who keeps a clean house and has a good figure and a reputation as a fun-loving person. Then invite her over to show you how to make up a bed. This is one of several ways you can take the drudgery out of housework. There are, of course, other ways to get assistance. If you have children, maybe you can train the dog to help. _D_u_s_t: _I_t'_s _O_r_i_g_i_n _a_n_d _M_e_a_n_i_n_g Look closely some fine day, and you may see a fine powdery gray substance forming on the furniture and window sills. This substance is dust, one of the driving princi- ples behind the entire concept of housecleaning. Just what dust is no one really knows, but it is probably caused by walking. As we walk, our pant legs or pantyhose rub together, grinding off fine particles of fiber and dead skin that float through the air and eventually come to rest on the furniture and window sills. One of the best things you can do to keep your house clean then, is to stop walking around so much. Try spending more time lying on the sofa watching TV. But no matter how careful you are, a certain amount of dust will inevitably occur. The traditional way of dealing with it is to wipe it up with a dustcloth, but this is time consuming and leaves you with the larger dilemna of what to do with the dirty rag. My own attitude is that if you leave dust alone, it will leave you alone. And it may even come in handy: How many times has a murderer been caught because the victim was able to write his assailant's name on a dusty table just before expiring? I feel that would-be killers out there are going to think twice about choosing me as a victim after they see the heavy layer of dust on my coffee table. _I _A_b_h_o_r _a _V_a_c_u_u_m I used to wonder: What happens to the dirt when it gets sucked up inside the vacuum cleaner? One of my theories was that the dirt was ionized so it traveled up the electrical cord and into the walls. Or I thought that maybe it just accumulated, and once a year, a team of people came and cleaned it out, like with swimming pools. Imagine my surprise one day when I was vacuuming and noticed small balls of fuzz blowing across the carpet. My wife explained that the fuzzballs were dirt coming from the vacuum cleaner because the bag was full. Bag? Full? Brimming with curiosity, I unzipped the vacuum, and sure enough, pulled out a bag of dirt, resisting an urge to slap it on the bottom. When the bag gets full, it is necessary to buy a new one. This is very depressing, because who of us, when we were growing up, ever expected to spend our hard-earned money on dirt bags? But here is the good news: You don't have to buy vacuum cleaner bags. Instead, every time the bag gets full, buy a fifth of bourbon. The bag it comes in will work just fine in your vacuum, and you can drink the bourbon while cleaning. You and your carpets will come out sparkling. Handy Hint: Often you'll find yourself pressed for time, as guests are soon to arrive and you haven't vacuumed the living room. For these emergencies, attach a handle to a 2 by 4 which you have cut the same width as the vacuum cleaner. Rake the 2 by 4 across the carpet a few times. The resulting streaks on the carpet will make it look freshly vacuumed. _O_v_e_n_s Look closely some day, and you may see large lumps of what appear to be petrified lava on the bottom of your oven. These are actually hard-fired lumps of gravy from frozen Salisbury steak entrees, one of the hardest substances known to science. The best way to get rid of them is to buy a self-cleaning oven. Lock it shut, hit the right button, and the oven becomes an inferno the temperature of the sun. The intense heat turns the formidable gravy into a powdery ash (which, by the way, is quite tasty sprinkled on scrambled eggs). Put the drip pans from the burners in the oven and the blast of heat will clean them too. And if the drip pans, why not the lawn mower blades? Or the tax records? _T_h_e _S_e_l_f _C_l_e_a_n_i_n_g _B_a_t_h_r_o_o_m Inspired by the example of the self cleaning oven, I have invented the self cleaning bathroom. Sprinkle every- thing with Comet, turn the shower on "hot" full blast and lock the door for a half hour. Small children left in the bathroom during the cleaning cycle will come out looking like new. _A_n_d _A_d_d _F_a_b_r_i_c _S_o_f_t_e_n_e_r _f_o_r _S_t_a_t_i_c _F_r_e_e _D_i_s_h_e_s It frequntly happens that you need some clean dishes, but don't have enough dirty one for a full dishwasher load. At the same time, you will often need clean socks and underwear, but won't have a full clothes-washer load. It would be stupid, of course, to wash the dishes in the clothes-washer, but there is no reason why you can't wash your laundry in the dishwasher! It will actually increase your efficiency in the morning when you're trying to find both a clean coffee cup and clean underwear. And that's just Chapter One. Next I will take up Chapter Two, in which I will explain that contrary to what you may have thought, Windex is *not* a remedy for flatu- lence. -- Binayak Banerjee {allegra | astrovax | bpa | burdvax}!sjuvax!bbanerje P.S. Send Flames, I love mail.