{"id":211,"date":"2008-02-11T09:50:39","date_gmt":"2008-02-11T13:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/11\/not-really-helping\/"},"modified":"2008-02-11T12:33:05","modified_gmt":"2008-02-11T16:33:05","slug":"not-really-helping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/11\/not-really-helping\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Really Helping"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many years ago I shared a house with 4-6 other adults (people came, people went). We shared a fridge, dishes, and kitchen appliances and the deal was that we’d each contribute to the common expenses (like toilet paper) and took turns on the chores like cleaning the bathroom, sweeping the floors, vacuuming, and doing the dishes. <\/p>\n

There was one roommate who seemed to stretch her contribution as thin as was tolerable. Her turn to buy toilet paper usually meant she stole some from public bathrooms. Sometimes rolls of sandpaper-y stuff, sometimes a stack of those little individual squares. When it was her turn for dish duty she would wash some<\/em> dishes, but never all. When she was done, the counter top would be unusable because of the dishes drying on it, and the sink would be unusable because there’d still be dishes in it. I never understood the logic of it, I just knew that whenever she was done there was still work for someone else to finish.<\/p>\n

\"very<\/a> photo by Squonk11<\/a><\/p>\n

She might have been using the strategy known as “if I do a really lousy job they won’t want me to do it next time.” Or maybe she thought hers was a legitimate contribution. It drove the rest of us crazy. There’s something about false helping. When you’ve done something, no matter how small, no one can criticize you for not helping. My roommate did in fact do some dishes. It’s just that her helping required the rest of us to do extra work. At her turn to clean the kitchen, we knew that who ever went in there next would get stuck finishing the job. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many years ago I shared a house with 4-6 other adults (people came, people went). We shared a fridge, dishes, and kitchen appliances and the deal was that we’d each contribute to the common expenses (like toilet paper) and took turns on the chores like cleaning the bathroom, sweeping the floors, vacuuming, and doing the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,39,37,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.femilicious.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}