I was waiting for this week for a couple of months. Do you want to know why? My husband was on a business trip again! You wouldn’t hear me saying that a few years ago. In the past, he used to travel a lot and I was alone all the time, so I wished he was able to travel less. Now, you might wonder why I was looking forward to this trip..
The truth is that sometimes I simply need to clean our apartment! So no, I was not planning a big party while he was away 😊 Let me explain..
When he doesn’t travel, he prefers to work from home. He works with people from different time zones and it can happen that he might be on a call with the US at 9 PM our time or with Asia at 6 AM. This would be difficult to maintain in the office, so he has his office at home as well. I usually don’t enter that room because it’s a complete mess and I would start cleaning it immediately which would be difficult with him sitting there all the time.
However, we will have visitors next week and I assume that they would like a tour around our apartment, so cleaning was inevitable. And therefore, I was happy that he wasn’t at home this week.
He left on Monday and I was planning to start my cleaning project on Tuesday. I hoped that it would take me up to one day to go through all the papers, bills, newspapers and whatever else I would find there. I was wrong!
It took me two days and I am not going to describe everything I did as it would require a process map for you to be able to follow but I’m going to talk about a few things that happened during these two days.
I’ve filed more than 300 bills/statements/letters in the binders. It must be clear that those papers were in envelopes before. On the front of each envelope is a foil window. If you also separate paper and plastic like me then you understand by now that I had to cut out that foil from each envelope. I’ve read different opinions about this, but I decided to go with the conservative approach and cut it out. It took me 3 hours and I cut myself just a few of times.
I am always looking for pens. I thought we have some fairy tale elf at home who steals them to annoy me when we sleep. It turns out I was wrong as I found dozens of pens in the strangest places (such as under the cushion on his chair and I have no idea how it got there), so this elf doesn’t steal them. He only hides them!
My husband collects newspapers in the hopes of getting to read them once he retires so there were paper piles all over the office. Well, I believe that deep down we both know this is not going to happen, so I’ve tied them up for recycling and will secretly remove them from our home 😊 The oldest one that I found was from 2016!
And this is not the only thing that he collects. He also collects all kind of receipts! It's not collecting in the right sense though but it's rather being lazy to dispose of them. We don't have a paper shredder machine so I had to check all those old receipts to make sure that I would put the relevant ones aside and then cut all of them in small pieces. It took me another couple of hours and let me tell you that it really hurts when you cut your finger with paper. I'm sure that anyone who works in an office knows what I'm talking about.
We have large library up to the ceiling. When I was sorting out the books and trying to create some order on bookshelves one heavy business book fell right on my head from top of library. At that time, I was about to give up and save my dear life from other accidents, but I continued my mission as I don’t like failing. I ended up hurting my back, so I didn’t sleep properly for two nights in a row. And I still have that lump on my head.
Lucky me, there were no major disasters and I finished my project on Wednesday night. My husband is back at home and he is very happy with the result – or at least he pretends to be which is enough for my satisfaction 😊
On a positive note, I found a 100 EUR note casually placed on the table under piles of newspapers and took it as my commission for my hard work and minor accidents 😊
I know that this is not my usual kind of writing so we can call it a shitpost or a freewrite. Either way, I simply needed to share it with you.
Thank you for reading!
Cheers,
Martina