Putting Things Off
Peter McKay
Saturday, June 23, 2007
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “procrastination” as “to put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness, to postpone or delay needlessly.”
There’s no picture to illustrate that definition, but if I can find a really flattering picture of my family, I’m going to send it in and see whether they’d consider including it.
We’re the type of people who change light bulbs only when we get to where we’re stumbling around in the dark. We wait to buy coffee till we’re so desperate that we’re scrambling to find and consolidate those little packets we’ve stolen from hotels. Around our house, we pretty much never do anything until it positively, absolutely has to be done and there are no more excuses. Then we wait a couple of weeks after that.
The place on which this takes the greatest toll is the kitchen. Our refrigerator developed some sort of leak, with water slowly dripping down the inside of the back wall and collecting as a big block of ice in the bottom. Then, when the block got too big, water began slowly dripping out the front of the fridge and now collects in a pool underneath it.
This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that we installed a click-together “floating wood floor,” which is made out of particleboard with a photograph of wood on top of it. When it gets wet, the particleboard swells and twists, totally destroying the look. I find it ironic that the floor isn’t really wood, but in our house, at least, it is really floating.
Because of our lifelong devotion to the art of procrastination, we’ve been living with this problem for over a year. Instead of calling a repairman, I ignore the situation until I notice that water has begun collecting again, and then wait a couple of days until I have enough time to clean it up. As a result, the floor below our fridge is no longer a smooth, shiny, reasonable facsimile of wood, but instead is a twisted, spongy mess.
Of course, that only destroyed half of the kitchen floor. The other half was destroyed by our leaky old dishwasher that long ago gave up any effort to actually clean dishes, and now only makes groaning noises, emits clouds of steam and drips hot soapy water all over the floor. Watch carefully as we put in dirty dishes, close the door and press a button! An hour later, we open the door and our dishes are — voila! — dirtier than they were when they went in. It’s like some kind of perverse magic trick.
The dripping from the dishwasher has worked its way under the floating floor to the point where it almost, but not quite, meets the destruction from the fridge.
Any sane person would 1) call a refrigerator repairman, 2) buy a new dishwasher, and 3) install a new floor before our kitchen floor crumbles and we’re eating breakfast in the basement laundry room. I’ve checked everywhere around my house and can’t find a single sane person, so we continue on in this way, our kitchen floorboards becoming almost as twisted as our logic.
This continued until one weekend when I was out barbecuing while my wife cleaned the kitchen. Suddenly I heard a huge crash. I ran into the house to find that the top rack of the dishwasher had come loose, one of the rollers snapped clean in two. Broken glasses, virtually all of the glassware we owned, were spread across the floor. My wife looked up at me, about ready to cry.
“That’s it!” she cried. “We’re getting a new dishwasher! Today!”
That was a month and a half ago. Since then, by relying on the principles of procrastination, we’ve gotten along using only the bottom shelf of the dishwasher. This is easier than you might think, because, as you might understand by now, we never got around to buying new glasses.
Every time I start to get around to thinking about it, I sit back, have a nice cold coffee-cup of beer and promise myself that we will do something about it.
Next week.
For sure.
F To find out more about Peter McKay, please visit www.creators.com.