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If You Want a Tidy Apartment, Buy a Crap Computer

Or, how I learned to stop stressing and do the chores

By Joe YoungPublished about a year ago 5 min read
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Responding to 'not responding' Image by ACWells from Pixabay

The home in which I grew up was generally a tidy place. The living room was always spotless, and my mother was a stickler for washing the pots right after a meal. Her assiduousness, however, doesn't appear to have rubbed off onto her offspring. The bedroom I shared with one of my two brothers was often an eyesore that let the side down badly.

It was the usual childhood wreck; toy cars awaiting recovery on the carpet, Lego blocks strewn around, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had been spilled several days earlier and spread about by passing feet. Items of school uniform mixing with bits of football kit. Throw in a few dirty cups and a plate on which repose the stale remnants of an earlier Welsh rarebit, and you have my childhood habitat. Call me Oscar Madison Junior.

But the situation would only be allowed to deteriorate so far before my mother, or grandma, would epitomise the word appalled, and bark an order that we clear up the mess instanter!

Joseph's Law

I seemed to outgrow my slovenliness in adulthood, but only until I moved into a house I shared with two friends. Free of parental checking, my friends and I took our lead from The Young Ones. Of course, we did have occasional bursts of energetic cleaning activity, and we did try to keep the place tidy, but chores like washing the pots and vacuuming the carpet were a low priority when there was a pub just around the corner, so they were not undertaken with the required regularity.

During that period I noticed that unexpected visitors would usually call when the place was untidy, a pattern that led me to formulate what I will call Joseph's Law, which states:

The more important an unexpected visitor is, the more untidy the dwelling place will be.

It works. While the living room would be in a state of only mild untidiness when friends called, an indoor typhoon would pre-empt a visit from a bigwig.

An example of one such typhoon flaring up occurs when a tenant enters the living room. He trips on an overflowing ashtray on the floor, which unburdens itself of a hundred cigarette ends that spew across the carpet. The trip causes the tenant to stumble, and in falling he throws the bowl of tomato soup he is carrying against the wallpaper. The smashing of the bowl startles the tenants' pet labrador so much, it defecates on a hearthrug. The scene is now perfectly set for the landlord to come a-knocking in an unannounced visit to see how his tenants are looking after the place.

Spick and span

But now I live alone, so I am entirely responsible for how my flat looks. Ashtrays are long gone as I ditched the cigs decades ago, but I do cook regularly, and I have been known to let the dishes pile up a bit. Under my old regime, if someone knocked at the door, I might have had to hurriedly grab some strewn clothes from the living room floor, close the kitchen door, and kick several old newspapers under the settee before answering.

But now! Everything has changed, and my flat is in a permanent state of spick and span. It's like the before and after shots of a dwelling on Homes Under the Hammer. I no longer fear the unexpected guest, and I could lead a meter reader up the stairs and into the depths of my abode without fearing he'd tell his wife later that he was in a right old dump today. And it's all down to one tiny life-changing secret that I shall now reveal.

I bought a crap computer.

That's all I did. And while that purchase has been a poor one as far as social media and emails go, it has been a great boon to the upkeep of my flat. You see, this contraption takes over thirteen and a half minutes to boot up (I timed it). I used to sit staring at the screen - you know, the spinning disc and the Not Responding message. Then, once booted up the beast will occasionally go into a huff, in which it will freeze, and the screen will glaze over to prevent me from clicking on anything. It will often remain in that mode for several minutes.

Staring trance-like

My usual course of action during such waiting periods would be to play solitaire - but of course, I can't click on anything, so that's out. I have no choice other than to wait for the thing to start responding again, but that can take a while. I've wasted more time than I'd like to admit to staring trance-like at the spinning graphic that says to me, wait, hold on, I'm not ready yet, for minute after minute after minute. And, if I had a pound for every dead mouse click I've performed, I'd be a wealthy man. Having run out of swear words to aim at this piece of junk, I started utilising those ten-minute periods of downtime in a more productive way.

Instead of staring at the screen while my Facebook loads, I'll vacuum the living room. If Twitter says Not Responding on start-up, I might change the bedding. If the screen freezes, I can load the washing machine before the computer has loaded a page.

These irritating hold-ups happen sporadically every single day, so I'm well on top of things housework-wise. In fact, basic household chores are now so well catered for, I have to seek out less obvious tasks to do while the PC is not responding. The other day I took down and washed a glass lampshade, which I had dried and put back in place before my desktop had even loaded.

So, while we can all be a bit lax with the housework on occasion, I can vouch that buying a crap computer has revolutionised my domestic routine, and it could do the same for you.

Bad habits
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About the Creator

Joe Young

Blogger and freelance writer from the north-east coast of England

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