Amongst the most annoying myths of our time is the commonly-held belief that women keep their living spaces cleaner, tidier, and better organized than men do.

Now I happen to be a man, and throughout my entire career my desk has been the cleanest one in my office. And my firsthand experience with the women I’ve lived with… Well, I’d like to relate a couple of my real-world experiences, for illustrative purposes. And for entertainment value.

I’ve always bought fresh orange juice, rather than frozen concentrate. However, a woman I once lived with would bring home those little cardboard “cans” of concentrate and pull one out of our freezer and leave it on a counter to thaw before mixing it with water to make OJ.

On one memorable occasion, she left one out to thaw on top of our microwave, which sat on the kitchen counter. She left it there long enough for it to thaw.

She left it there long enough for it to ferment.

She left it there so long that the pressure from the ongoing fermentation caused the sealed canister to violently explode in the middle of the night, scaring us out of a sound sleep and coating the floor, the counter, the microwave, the under-side of the kitchen cupboards, the wall, and yes even the ceiling with sticky, rancid, orange glop.

I don’t know about you, but that kind of thing just doesn’t happen in my experience living alone or with other men.

But lest you think that’s one isolated data point, let’s consider the fascinating habits of one of the other women I’ve lived with…

This example of the fairer sex operated on the assumption that one should only wash dishes as needed. You need a saucepan? Dig one out of the pile of grime-laden dirty ones that covers the kitchen table and spills across the floor, and give it a quick wash.

At the time, we lived in a ground-floor apartment where the front door went straight from the front yard into the kitchen. This was a certified boon for my housemate, because whenever she cooked something sticky, smoky, stinky, or even the least bit messy, she could throw the dish outside on the lawn before sitting down and eating her meal. The dirty dish would usually sit outside overnight, forgotten.

That worked great for four months out of each year. For the other eight months, the inevitable snows of a northern Maine winter would bury the dirty cookware overnight, benevolently hiding all evidence of her cooking ability.

Things got better and better for her as winter plodded on. She had to do less and less cooking, because there weren’t any dishes left in the house to use, and there weren’t any dirty ones to wash, either! A veritable feminine idyll.

Needless to say, we somehow survived those long Maine winters subsisting on instant Cup-a-Soup and no-name cheezy poofs. Then, in April the reluctantly receding snows would reveal a front yard littered with rusted pots and pans bearing the unrecognizable remains of Shake-n-Bake chicken and burnt mac and cheese. Two months later, after she worked up the fortitude to clean up the front yard, we would eat like kings for four months… until the snow flew again and our dishes started disappearing.

So before you buy into the hateful old sexist line that men are irredeemable slobs, I’d urge you to do a little empirical fact-checking. I think you’ll find there are a large number of women who cannot keep their living environment tidy (never mind sanitary), and an ample number of men who can and do… Even without the prodding of some mythical fastidious woman.

In this post I gave you a glimpse into the drawbacks of living with my ex wife. Two days earlier, in this post I gushed when writing about the 25th anniversary of meeting Ailsa, my first girlfriend. Well, lest you get a lopsided picture, I thought I’d relate a story that casts Ailsa in a very different light.

Ailsa and I lived together for a brief time after my divorce. It was another period of intense learning for me. Some of those lessons were rather pleasant, as I alluded to in my Valentine’s Day post; and then some of them were less than pleasant, like the explosion.

Imagine sleeping peacefully and being suddenly woken up in the dead of night by a loud explosion. Something like a gunshot, actually. When I got up to investigate, everything looked okay until I got to the kitchen, where nothing was amiss… except for the blood dripping from the ceiling and all the shelves.

After some very traumatic WTF moments, I discovered that, no, it really wasn’t blood; it was orange juice. But it was f-ing everywhere!!!

Apparently what had happened was that Ailsa had taken one of those cans of frozen orange juice concentrate out of the freezer and left it on top of our microwave to thaw a little, before mixing it up in a pitcher with water.

And then promptly forgot it.

For several days.

Nature taking its course, the stuff thawed, warmed, and eventually fermented in its surprisingly well-sealed container. When the internal pressure reached a sufficient level—which of course happened at 3am one night—the can exploded like a water canon in a mostly-vertical jet of warm orange slop.

It coated the under-sides of four rows of shelving as well as half the ceiling before giving in to gravity and splooshing the shelves a second time on the way down, then the microwave, the countertops, and eventually the floor. I have never seen a mess like that in my life.

Of course, I’d like to say Ailsa’s OJ and Linda’s cookware behaviors were isolated incidents, but these kinds of hazards never came up when I lived with other guys in college. But then maybe I’m just prone to dating women with underdeveloped survival instincts.

Euhhh! I still have nightmares about that…

1 Broadway burns

I started a new project on Thursday the 30th. On Monday through Thursday our project team work at the client site in Cambridge, but on Fridays we work from our corporate office in Boston.

This is going to sound boring, but bear with me for another paragraph. It’ll get really interesting in a second.

So on the 30th I was at the client site, and December 1th I was at Optaros. Last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I was at the client site all day. On Thursday I had a one-day business trip to Manhattan, but the team was mostly in Cambridge. Then, on Friday the 8th, we were all working at our office in Boston.

It was 11am Friday when the client’s office building blew up.

Yeah, blew up. Two electricians were working on a transformer in the sub-basement when it blew, killing one of them. Approximately 600-800 people were in One Broadway at the time, and about a hundred were taken to area hospitals for smoke inhalation and later released after the subsequent major fire. The stairwells filled with toxic smoke and some people had to break windows and climb onto the roof of the adjacent parking garage. All this on the most brutally cold morning so far this season. You can read the full story and see image galleries via these links:

Boston Globe Saturday article
Boston Globe photo gallery
Boston Herald Friday article
Boston Herald Saturday article
Boston Herald photo gallery

It made for quite a surreal afternoon, as all the major news sources blared news about the fire and the subsequent shutdown of the Longfellow Bridge and the MBTA Red Line. And then it was on the front page of the local papers yesterday.

So we were very fortunate, in that our team of 30+, who usually work on the third floor, were not in the building that day, and all the client’s personnel made it out safely.

Since then I’ve received nearly a dozen email updates from the building management. It looks like the place will not reopen for about a week, during which time we’ll be hosting the client at our office space by North Station. That’s going to be a big jam, since we’re short on space and desks to begin with.

I still have a bunch of dress clothes over at One Broadway, but nothing irreplaceable. They can wait.

Very surreal. Perhaps I should add an Imminent Danger Pay clause in my employment agreement?

Frequent topics