Every once in a while I like to shine a little light into the dark corners of my brain, where all the ruminatin’ happens. If this sort of horror show appeals to you, you might try this earlier post, about why I have trouble falling asleep. Or this one, about conversing with 10-year-old boys. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
…
Back already? Dandy. So here’s the latest example of how my brain likes to chase its own tail.
Recently I hired a new housecleaner. She does a fine job, with a couple of exceptions. The first one is that she keeps putting dishes and kitchen apparati away on the highest shelf possible, despite the fact that I am 5’2, have a bum leg, and don’t own a step-stool. But that’s a story for another day. The story I want to tell you now happens is a bathroom story. No, not that kind of bathroom story.
I’m beginning with a set of assumptions about how housecleaners operate. If you were cleaning a bathroom, you would of course move all of the floor items out so you could mop, right? So you’d move out the hamper, the wastebasket, the scale, the bathroom rug; you’d mop the floor and wait for it to dry; you’d move everything back into place. So far, so good. Now here’s the quiz: When you replace the bathroom rug (2 feet by 3 feet, green, fuzzy), would you put it:
a) flush against the toekick under the sink
b) flush against the bottom of the shower door
c) back where it was when you got there
The correct placement of the bathroom rug. OR IS IT?
The correct answer is c), right? The rug is small enough that if it’s placed right up against the sink or against the shower door it won’t be underfoot when you step out of the shower, and the point of having the rug is so I don’t slip and fall on wet linoleum. So the rug is usually a few inches away from the bottom of the shower door. This seems logical to me, and I was surprised the first time I came home after the cleaner had visited and found it up against the sink. But this is the very definition of “not a big deal”, and I just moved it back where it goes and assumed she would notice that the next time she came and put it back there.
But she didn’t. Tonight I came home and it’s up against the sink again. OK, I thought. This is still not a big deal. I’ll just leave a note for her next time to tell her where I prefer to have the rug.
Except.
Except the more I thought about it, the more unsure I became about whether my preferred placement of the rug is actually the correct placement. What if everyone else in the world puts their rugs under the sink? What if I leave her a note telling her I want the rug in the middle of the floor and it makes her think she’s working for at best an eccentric old bat and at worst a complete nutcase? Where should the damn rug be put?
So now I’m thinking I won’t leave her a note about where to put the bathroom rug, and I’ll just move it back where I want it after she leaves each time. That way I get the rug where I think it’s supposed to be, and I don’t leave one more person with the impression that I am an extraterrestrial unused to your crazy human ways.
Yep, that’s definitely what I’m going to do, but I wonder what you would do? And more importantly, where is your bathroom rug?
Brilliant Disguise 