The Book of Ashes

Stress #2: The American flatmate. 12:44PM

She's actually Canadian but she embodies everything that think of when we picture the stereotypical American. First a quick summary. She works long hours. 6 days a week, 8 hours a day at the Lido (a cafe). She comes home tired and watches TV for, on average, 4 hours a night (sometimes 6). The TV is always on. Sometimes she drifts off while watching it. Sometimes she stares blankly at Home and Away. Conversation dies in this atmosphere to near nil. She eats lots of chippies, chocolates and other junk food. Once a week on average she will cook for herself. She does the dishes, on average since she moved in, once a fortnight. She has been in the flat for 6 months. Her longest period of not doing dishes is a month, this has happened twice out of the six months shes been there. She doesn't really do much house work. I had a chat to her so now her duties are the bathroom only, I do everything else in the flat (excluding dishes). After 3 weeks of her not cleaning the toilet or basin, I decided to clean it. If I turn music on when I come home (only if she's not already home) she watches her watch until 6pm then asks if she can watch the news (I can see she wants to watch home and away but would feel dumb to ask me to turn off my music just to watch a nothing show). After this it gets petty, for example she doesn't pull her weight with things around the flat. The other day I asked her to get rubbish bags. She said they had run out in the super market and she, for some reason couldn't get them the next day, so could I get them, she'd pay me back. So I got them, came home, she was sitting watching TV (why couldn't you get them again?), so I left the bill on the table. It got ignored. So I wrote a note asking her if she could pay me (rubbish bags are expensive, $13.30 for 10). She read the note and it disapeared, no money came forth. A few days later I asked her for the money, she said she thought we were going halves in things. I told her that if she wanted to go halves in rubbish bags then she owed me havles for the other two lots I'd already brought, since she'd been in the flat I'd spent $40 on rubbish bags with no contribution from her. She said in a huff, OK, I can't pay you till Thursday, thats when I get paid. OK fine. This is now 2-3 weeks after we originally needed the bags. OK another one springs to mind, came home late at night, found the oil heater on in the lounge, her bedroom door open (her alseep in bed) and four windows in the house open, two in the bathroom, two in my room. I think she was trying to heat her room by heating the world first and doing this with 12 hours of electricity. She doesn't really have any idea about closing windows, heating or cleaning a house. Is ignorance innocence? OK so fine, its not really any one thing, its the combination of everything (and this is just a summary of her finer moments). In her defence she is a nice person and working hard so always tired. But what got me was the reason she was working so hard, the reason she was tired, run down and not contributing to the flat. The reason was to buy a $600 dress. Go figure. I was a little angry when I found out. I'd been covering her housework and putting up with a depressing house for months to help her do this? Yeah well...

Anyway lesson for the young players out there. Talk to people early on. I let it build up for too long. I had a chat with Christal the other night and she was pretty good dealing with it, I think though because she deals with her bad desicions quite often. Now we are going a while without TV. I don't think we'll get any improvement in house work. I just have trouble understanding someone who lacks so much knowledge about living in houses and chooses to live the way she does. Her 6 month experience of NZ is mostly the Lido and NZ TV and NZ junk food. She could have got all that without leaving home.

So although this is ongoing it currently has decreased in stress value greatly.

Status = Delt with. Notes: Monitor for reoccurance

Men aren't redundant... 2:38PM

...just yet! So apparently they have managed to create a mouse with two mothers (no father). Theoritically the procedure could one day be performed on humans. Still we will always be needed to open those tight jars