I have gone on more than a few rants about how this house is My Workspace and in order for me to do my job efficiently and well (or… at all), the workspace should be run to my specifcations. Most of the time, it is. Certain people occasionally have to be reminded to Not Touch My Stuff (and god help you if you disturb a pile), but that’s becoming rarer.
The only thing that I really don’t like to do is deal with the trash. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Freddie to handle that, especially when you consider I have never once asked him to clean a toilet in 16 years and we have three of them now.
Yesterday, I took a bag of trash out to the cans (normally I would have waited and made him do it but it was smelly and gross) and I noticed that he’d emptied out a box of packing material directly into the big trash can. Sigh. If we lived anywhere else, I probably would have let it go, but we are On Record as having issues with the trash pickup in our town.
This is because our neighbors on one side are totally whackadoodle and their son is a garbageman. There’s a history.
Knowing this, I fired off an email to Freddie telling him that he would be responsible for getting that crap in a bag. I am certain that if I had just left it, the garbage collectors would have dumped that can into the truck and those packing peanut things would have flown out and made a huge mess. Which means they would come knocking on my door to give me shit about it and I am Not Having That.
So, Freddie got home from work last night and went out to inspect the trash can. He came back in saying something like “I think it will be fine. It’s all packed down.”
Erm. No. It needs to be in a bag.
A discussion was held, wherein I trotted out the classic “don’t make me think for you” and ended with “if you leave it like that and the garbage guys knock on the door to give me shit about it, I will stab you with this 12-inch chef’s knife.”
A few minutes later, he went out and bagged all that stuff up. He said later that he was thinking about calling my bluff and seeing if I would really stab him, but I just fixed him with a grey-eyed glare and he finally realized that I was quite serious, actually. Then he apologized.
Would I have actually followed through with the stabbing? Lucky for him, we’ll never know.
…until next time.