There are many days when I come home after work and don't take notice of the great effort my wife put in to cleaning the house. Most days that this happens I am just to exhausted to notice. We keep our home pretty well organized and clean on a regular basis. She still likes to go through and do a thorough job while I'm gone and can't get in the way. Still, with the house never in terrible shape it can be easy to overlook the detailed cleanliness that results from her hard work (I'm not a detail oriented person by nature, anyway).
Being told, "You didn't say how clean the house looks" is almost a ritual at this point. Now the tables are turned. I prepared a little experiment. staying at home while she was at work and I had a few things I needed to clean up while she was away. It was the typical honey-do list. The big project was the floor. (It really only needed to be Swiffered.) I cleaned the floor, as was the plan, and waited for her to come home. It looked decent at the end, but then I tracked all kinds of loose junk all over it when I came in the house from being outside (I didn't care enough to do anything about it).
I was playing video games when she got home, just to make it appear as though I was my usual self who hadn't done anything all day. (Not because I just love playing video games.) She comes back to see me and I say hello and she says nothing about the floor. Hours go by while she plays Zelda (Success!!!) without a word. Finally, while I'm getting dinner ready she asks if I cleaned the floor.
First of all, she didn't mention that the floor looked clean. To me, it looked much the same as it always does, but if she couldn't tell the difference then I needed to play along with it for a while. I told her I had forgotten the floor. I cleaned the bathroom, but not the floor. She looked irritated at this. Why did I not tell her the truth? I wanted to see if she would notice!
Almost twenty minutes passed and she did not say anything outside of the usual lecture about how lazy I can be. Being terrible at keeping secrets from her, I couldn't keep it in much longer. Slowly, I walked up to her, put my arm around her shoulders and as we looked out across the nearly spotless floors (remember my tracking filth in) she started to sense something was up. Bursting into laughter I told her that I had cleaned the floors and I just wanted to see if she would say anything when she got home. She had failed my test.
Apparently, I had failed hers too. After dinner I asked her on a scale of 1-10 how disappointed she was with me. She said 4. She wasn't disappointed at all. That is when I realized she had lower expectations of me than I had thought. The even further disappointment came later that night. (Not that you sicko!) She was brushing her teeth and called me into the bathroom and saw the major areas I had missed cleaning. Not least of which was the fully clouded mirror or the soap scum on the sink. All that planning on pulling one over on her failed because I couldn't escape my nature and overlooked the easy targets.
Maybe next time.
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