Holidays, heating and happiness
Of course, the problem with holidays is that they show you what you’re missing while at work. Not that work isn’t sometimes fun. This week there was a hilarious moment when someone failing to open a door misheard me asking if she was Norma. There was also a trip on a barge, which is a cool work thing to do, provided you’re not a barge captain.
While work can be fun, it involves very little sitting around reading books in between dips in the pool. Nor does it involve hanging out with people you don’t get to see enough of. Sometimes you get to yell silly things, but not half as often as makes it truly fun. And no-one yet has deliberately tried to get me drunk at work.
There are the usual things that I miss about being on holidays - my own bed and pillows being the main ones. With the rare exception of the Comfort Inn in Atlanta, other people’s pillows are just wrong. On the few occasions that you do discover someone with great pillows, it’s best to strike up a relationship with them as soon as possible. The downside to this is the sleepless nights when you break up. You fool yourself into thinking that you’re missing him, but secretly you know deep inside that the reason the bed feels too big without him is just because you can’t get your neck comfortable.
If your ex was a radiator, that can also cause withdrawal symptoms. It’s a proven scientific* fact that some guys just radiate heat. At a time when people are so worried about peak oil, and the rising costs of heating homes, I can’t understand why the Sustainable Energy groups are still sitting around talking about air. Winds around Ireland are invariably a little chilly. Sure, we get the odd souwesterly, but usually if there’s enough wind around to power a small generator, it’ll be chilly.
Warm men, on the other hand, are self replicating. Two of them installed in your home can provide enough heat for whatever room you happen to be in at the time. Their recharge time is relatively low, so by the time you’ve finished leaching all the heat from one, the other will have warmed up again enough to start providing warmth. Having two men around the house at all times can be useful in other ways too.
There are downsides though - two men will assume that they’re each doing more housework than the other one, and will reduce their effort to the perceived effort of the other. This has been widely studied by economists** and is known as non-altruistic lazy buggers. It has been shown that theoretical economic experiments in the laboratory show a marked tendency towards altruism, but that the same altruism is rarely apparent in practical experiments***
When two men are competing to see who can do the least housework, anything they can’t observe is not counted. Therefore unless your mate is actively handing you the rubber gloves, he has no reason to believe you really cleaned the oven. You can show him the clean oven that you spent 6 hours scraping, steaming and slaving over, but he’ll tell you it always looks like that. If you point out that he spilled half the pizza toppings in it last night, and then proceeded to let them bake on, he’ll produce the manual telling you that the oven is self cleaning.
Once this spiral of non-competitiveness has started, the only place it will end is when the HSA has the building condemned, and both move into a shiny new build. At this stage both blokes will tell you it’s exactly like the old place. Sadly, within two weeks, this will be true.
*No science was used in the creation of this article.
** Not really. But it should.
*** John List
While work can be fun, it involves very little sitting around reading books in between dips in the pool. Nor does it involve hanging out with people you don’t get to see enough of. Sometimes you get to yell silly things, but not half as often as makes it truly fun. And no-one yet has deliberately tried to get me drunk at work.
There are the usual things that I miss about being on holidays - my own bed and pillows being the main ones. With the rare exception of the Comfort Inn in Atlanta, other people’s pillows are just wrong. On the few occasions that you do discover someone with great pillows, it’s best to strike up a relationship with them as soon as possible. The downside to this is the sleepless nights when you break up. You fool yourself into thinking that you’re missing him, but secretly you know deep inside that the reason the bed feels too big without him is just because you can’t get your neck comfortable.
If your ex was a radiator, that can also cause withdrawal symptoms. It’s a proven scientific* fact that some guys just radiate heat. At a time when people are so worried about peak oil, and the rising costs of heating homes, I can’t understand why the Sustainable Energy groups are still sitting around talking about air. Winds around Ireland are invariably a little chilly. Sure, we get the odd souwesterly, but usually if there’s enough wind around to power a small generator, it’ll be chilly.
Warm men, on the other hand, are self replicating. Two of them installed in your home can provide enough heat for whatever room you happen to be in at the time. Their recharge time is relatively low, so by the time you’ve finished leaching all the heat from one, the other will have warmed up again enough to start providing warmth. Having two men around the house at all times can be useful in other ways too.
There are downsides though - two men will assume that they’re each doing more housework than the other one, and will reduce their effort to the perceived effort of the other. This has been widely studied by economists** and is known as non-altruistic lazy buggers. It has been shown that theoretical economic experiments in the laboratory show a marked tendency towards altruism, but that the same altruism is rarely apparent in practical experiments***
When two men are competing to see who can do the least housework, anything they can’t observe is not counted. Therefore unless your mate is actively handing you the rubber gloves, he has no reason to believe you really cleaned the oven. You can show him the clean oven that you spent 6 hours scraping, steaming and slaving over, but he’ll tell you it always looks like that. If you point out that he spilled half the pizza toppings in it last night, and then proceeded to let them bake on, he’ll produce the manual telling you that the oven is self cleaning.
Once this spiral of non-competitiveness has started, the only place it will end is when the HSA has the building condemned, and both move into a shiny new build. At this stage both blokes will tell you it’s exactly like the old place. Sadly, within two weeks, this will be true.
*No science was used in the creation of this article.
** Not really. But it should.
*** John List