Who does what?

Marriage experts advise that when determining who will be responsible for various chores, one factor to consider is the level of comfort or skill one partner or the other has with a particular chore. If your partner loves to cook, it makes sense for him or her to do most of the cooking if that works for the household schedule. 

But this does method have its flaws. Some people -- who often happen to be men -- may try to foist an unpleasant chore on their partners by means of flattery: "Oh, honey, you are SO much better than I am at folding the shirts and pants and underwear and socks and putting them back in the SAME drawer every time! How do you DO that? You really should be the one to do that regularly. I'll just mess it up."

They secretly suspect women have a gene for cleaning toilets, or changing diapers.

In our house, anything that is routinely used in the same sentence with digital or electronic is typically understood to be in the Hero's realm of expertise. Thus, anything to do with the computer, TV, cable, Internet, stereo, etc., I leave for him to handle. I am SURE that he has a gene for this. (I do, however, take responsibility for resetting the time and date on the phone whenever the power goes out, mainly because he does not care if it gets reset or not.) 

There is another method of handling chores, however, and that is that whoever complains about an issue in the household is the one who becomes the de facto Dealer with the Problem. This unfortunately was the case recently when I complained -- once too often, apparently -- about our Internet going down multiple times a day. 

"Call the company," the Hero suggested. 

So I did, although the reader may infer that much more conversation on this topic -- which is not being reprinted here -- transpired between the Hero and myself before my call.

Here is how my conversation with a representative of our service provider went:

Rep: And what can I help you with today?

Me: Our Internet goes down several times a day.

Rep: Oh! That is NOT good. I'll be glad to help you try to fix that. First, do you have a router?

Me: [looking at four large boxes in the vicinity of the computer] Hmmm, eeny, meeny, miney, moe...okay, miney must be the router.

Rep: I beg your pardon?

Me: Uh, that was a yes! Yes, we have a router. [crossing fingers that this is true]

Rep: Okay. Is your modem connected to your computer through the router?

Me: Sure! [have no idea what she's talking about]

Rep: Okay. The modem needs to be directly connected to your computer so we can adjust the signal.

Me: [getting nervous] You know, maybe we should do this another time. I think the dinner is burning. I'd better go check. 

Rep: Uh, it's only 10 a.m. in your time zone.

Me: Wow, I see flames! Bye!

This brings us to the third method for determining who does what in the household: If you mess something up, you are generally absolved from further handling that particular chore.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go and exercise my gene for eating cookies. I'm pretty sure I have one.