It's not my job...

In every household, everyone has a job that is their job, that causes bucketsful of resentment when anyone else in the family is asked to do it. My son puts out the bins. When he’s not here or tries to fob it off on the daughter, she digs in her heels with a will that could see small countries invaded.

The daughter is in charge of writing birthday cards and wrapping presents. If asked to fold a triangle and stick his thumb on it, the son makes sure that the Sellotape takes on a life of its own, collecting crumbs, dog hairs and bits of red fluff from my slippers. The husband – apart from the rather huge task of doing the day job - is in charge of watching the rugby and war films with the son. Whisper Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood or Tuilagi to me, my shoulders go up round my ears and I remember an urgent need to sort socks.

Despite all these years of feminism, most households I know fall roughly into gender stereotypes – the men do the cars, the lawnmowing and DIY and the women do the day-to-day cooking, cleaning and ironing with a few grey area tasks in between such as supermarket shopping and Sunday lunches. But not in our household. I was definitely a bloke in a former life. Checking of the tyres, filling up the windscreen washers, screwing handles back on all fall under my jurisdiction, partly to stop the husband appearing with a mallet when a hammer is required and making one small job into several larger ones.

Husband's job: never to go near a nail
Image courtesy of foto76, freedigitalphotos.net

But one job that is definitely my job is anything disgusting. Recently, my happy little task was to unblock the drains. After a huge downpour and the slow joining of the dots in my brain, I had to stop pretending that those round lumps on the patio were anything to do with the dog and accept that I needed a man – or in this case, a woman – with a rod and a pair of large rubber gloves. The husband immediately started gagging, squealing like a girl, dancing about with the Yellow Pages and dialling Dyno-Rod. But weird as this might sound, I find a strange satisfaction in sorting things out, caveman-like. Do hope I don’t grow a hairy chest. I find it so fulfilling to get the manhole cover up, yank on some unidentified congealed blockage and have to sprint away for fear of being buried under an avalanche of excrement.

Similarly, every shower I’ve ever known appears to suck every last hair off my head with the sole purpose of weaving a hairy rat out of it and giving it a new home in the waste pipe. Never mind ecologically friendly drain clearers, a chap with a head torch and pickaxe would be hard pressed to find his way through the wig-rats that take up residence in our house. However, nothing is a match for me and my wire coat hanger. The unbridled joy of getting hold of one tiny little thread of hair and finding that a fat rat follows, a slippery little sucker glooping out into my plastic bag. Bliss.

Recently, we had our bathroom floor tiled. This led to a lovely little scene whereby I was playing table tennis with the daughter when the teenage son came mumbling out about there being some problem in the sitting room. I immediately assumed that there was a glitch with the X-Box, an evening ruining broadband crisis or some other tragedy relating to electronic what-nots. I was so engrossed in not ceding any ground to the daughter in the one sport I can still occasionally muster triumph that I nodded vaguely to the announcement that there was water pouring through the ceiling. Eventually, the words ‘Swimming pool on the sofa’ filtered through. In my moment of confusion, the dog seized the chance to dash off down the garden with the ping-pong ball, thereby transforming one disaster into a potential two…the ceiling waterfall plus the lodging of the ball in the dog’s windpipe. As I’ve said before, she does everything with such aplomb. Once we managed to swap a piece of sausage for the ping-pong ball I was free to concentrate on disaster number one.

Darling, shall I fetch the mallet?
Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti, freedigitalphotos.net

Suffice to say, this is where I realised that everyone has clearly defined jobs, whichever household they live in. The tiler’s job was to put tiles on the floor in a straight line and grout them. It was not to know how to fix a pipe that had been nicked by a nail, identify an isolation valve or have a handy mate who was a plumber. The son’s job was to sit like the boy in the dyke legend with his thumb over the hole whilst moaning about missing Waterloo Road. The husband’s job was to scratch his chin whilst the wife sweated and screwdrivered off bath panels with not a little swearing.

But luckily, the wife’s job remit was a broad one which included identifying the household where the husband’s job was to know how to stop a leak, have the appropriate tools and the calm demeanour that meant he didn’t mind turning out at nine o’clock at night.

Can’t wait for that happy day when they identify me as the one who deals with drains…