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Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed to Get Caught Naked, Apparently

Man, I’m a tool sometimes.

(Yes, sometimes, I said. Sometimes. Smartass.)

It snowed here overnight, and well into the morning. Not at blizzard strength or anything, but enough to keep a few key people from coming into the office today. So, when I checked email this morning, I found that all my meetings had been cancelled, little was happening, and still the snow was falling. It seemed like a fantastic day to work from home, at least until mid-afternoon or so.

Now, for many of you, ‘work from home’ might not mean actually work from home. Maybe to you, that means ‘sleep’ from ‘bed’. Or ‘ski’ from ‘the nearest mountain’. Or ‘play video games for four hours’ from ‘your home computer’. In your ‘tighty-whities’.

Well, not me. No way — I like to think I’m above that sort of shenanigans.

(And besides, I wear boxers. Get your undergarments straight, people.)

So, the upshot is, I stayed home for a while. What I was actually accomplishing, or not accomplishing — that’s really not germane to the discussion, all right? I’m not the one on trial here.

Oh, wait. Okay, okay, so I am the one on trial here, but not for what I was doing in my house today. Not yet. We’ll get to that.

I should probably also mention that — since there was no one else in the house with me — I took my sweet damned time prettying myself up for the rest of the world. The boxers and T-shirt I slept in were good enough for the dog, and that was good enough for me. For about four hours, in fact. I bummed around the house today. Maybe even schlepped. I’m not afraid to admit it. It happens. You do it, too, sometimes. Don’t give me that look.

Anyway, around two in the afternoon or so, I got a bit peckish.

(No, not ‘peckerish‘, dammit. Stop thinking about the boxers. Stay with me, here, for chrissakes.)

So, I headed downstairs to the kitchen for lunch. And on the kitchen table, I saw a check. A check for the cleaning women who come by the house once or twice a month, to make the place smell better. More presentable. Less squalortastic, if you will. Seeing the check there stopped me in my tracks. I paused, and thought. I scratched my ass. And I thought some more.

You see, normally, when that check is on the table, it means the cleaning people are coming that day. We don’t just randomly write checks and plop them on tables around our house, waiting to see who might come to cash them. There’s generally a method to our madness, and we write the check on the day it’s needed.

(That’s called ‘efficiency’, people.

My wife handles that, because I’m what’s called a ‘cluetard’. That whole check-writing dealie is her thing. I don’t get to handle pointy objects like pens, of course. Or money. Or tables, for that matter. I’m pretty well restricted to those objects around the house that I can’t hurt, can’t hurt me back, and can’t damage our credit score. But I digress.)

So, needless to say, I was a bit worried, standing there in my beddy clothes, when some strange pair of Spanish-speaking women could just barge in at any time and gasp at my unshoweredness. I could just see them cracking open the front door and peeking into the kitchen and exclaiming, ‘Dios mio!‘ Or, ‘Ay, carumba!‘ Or maybe, ‘El diablo tiene mucho queso!‘

(Yes, because I don’t speak Spanish myself, and my only sources for what a startled Spanish-speaker might say come from the Simpsons and whatever I can make up myself.

And, apparently, some part of my brain imagines that a Spanish-speaking woman, if sufficiently startled, might just blurt out, ‘The devil has lots of cheese!‘ Whether that’s a good startled, or a bad startled, I can’t really say. It might well depend on the type of cheese.)

In any case, after my initial panic, I realized that the cleaning ladies weren’t coming today. No way. For one thing, that check has been there for three days. We thought they were coming on Tuesday, but there was some sort of mix-up. I saw the check on Wednesday, and thought they were coming then, but no. Clearly, I thought to myself, the check is just sitting there, because it will be needed soon — but not today.

Plus, these people have never come on a Thursday before. Monday, sure. I seem to remember a Friday when they were here. Even once — and I still have the scars to prove it — on a Tuesday. But Thursday? Nahhhhh.

So, I grabbed some food, ate it, and hopped in the shower for a nice, long, hot soaping-up.

Ten, fifteen minutes later, I got out of the shower.

Sometime in between — you guessed it — the cleaning ladies showed up. Poop.

So there I was, a naked, dripping prisoner in my own house. Was one of them just outside the bathroom door, waiting to scream and run and yell the ‘devil’s cheese’ thing? Or were they at the top of the stairs, ready to cluck and tsk at me for being a lazy loco gringo all day? Or maybe they were done with the rest of the house already, and just about to burst into the bathroom brandishing mops and toilet brushs and that ‘scrubbing bubbles’ crap-in-a-can, and my wet slippery nudity be damned!

I didn’t know the answer. It made me scared, a little. There was shrinkage. And that made me scarederer.

Of course, eventually I wrapped a towel around myself, cracked the door open, and checked the hallway. The coast was clear — they were downstairs, had no doubt heard the water, and probably deal with this shit all the time. So, I dried off, hopped into my room, got dressed, said hola on my way out, scurried to the office, and all was well, after all.

Still. I’m a damned tool. Especially since this is the second time this shit has happened. You’d think I’d fricking learn, wouldn’t you? I mean, who wants to be stuck in their house naked with two exotic women running around with feather dusters and… oh. Right. Maybe it’s one of those subconscious, penisy kind of things, huh?

Nah. I’m way more ‘Eek!‘ over this stuff than I am ‘Ooooooh!‘, if you know what I mean. I think I’m just a fucking tool, is all. That pretty much covers the bases here. Ay, carumba!