Cop out.
After I returned to the apartment complex after work yesterday, I went immediately to the management office to complain about the partially painted doors on my floor (they repainted the hallways last weekend, but neglected to put more than a sloppy base coat on the fire doors on my floor, and they look like crap). I also complained that my request to have the toilet looked at that was placed several months ago still hadn’t been acted on (they took another work order on it and offered no apologies). To ice the cake, I lodged a complaint about the gnats in my apartment, which (near as I can tell) are related to the toilet problem. Having gotten some of the bitchiness out of my system, I left the office, only to run into The Professor coming out of our building door with a trash can in hand.
I couldn’t see what was in the trash can, but it had a ceramic jangle to it. No rocket science required here. He also had the canister to the vacuum cleaner in hand, full of debris and ready to be emptied. I wanted to be terse, but I think all I managed to do was come across tired. He emptied the trash while I waited at the front door, and I heard the final clank of my 22 year old Pfaltzcraft hit the bottom of the dumpster.
We went upstairs, and I found a freshly vacuumed apartment. The dishes were all done, the bathrooms had been mopped, the cat boxes cleaned. I complimented him on all his hard work, while he made a point of telling me everything he’d accomplished since he’d gotten home from the college. He then started asking me how my day was, that I seemed tired when I left that morning, how he missed the way I used to greet him when I came home at the end of the day (comparing my former way of enthusiastically throwing myself at him to today’s lackluster greeting). Both of us dancing around the issue of the broken dishes, waiting for the other to bring it up.
Finally I mentioned that my day had gotten off to a less than auspicious start before I left the apartment, and that probably had a good deal to do with my mood leaving that morning and returning that night. He finally admitted to wondering if the dishes were broken before I left for work or after. I strongly suspect that, had I not given him direct cues that I knew about the broken dishes, he’d not have brought them up.
His first course of action was to try and determine which of the cats was to blame. He wanted to blame the Warrior Princess, confirming how guilty he must have been feeling. Ordinarily, his cat can do no wrong, and it’s either the Clueless Wonder or (more likely) the Kitten from Hell that gets the blame. I told him there was no point in worrying about it, since it was too late to discipline any of them. I pointed out that we were just lucky that none of the cats were hurt, or got sick over an ill-gotten meal.
When The Prof realized I wasn’t going to make a scene about the broken plates, he seemed to relax. He did point out that I’d said I wanted to get new dishware eventually, and now we were closer to being able to do so. I had indeed said that, and recently, although it may have been imprudent of him to bring that up just then. I left that one slide as well.
My resolution? I’m doing the dishes. I refuse be at the mercy of somebody else in matters that I care about. He’s going to be pissed, he’s going to be upset, he’s perhaps even going to have a bit of a tantrum, but I have decided that the end to negotiations regarding this has come. He may not want to do dishes after dinner. So be it. I do, and they will be done. We’ve tried it his way. It doesn’t work. End of discussion.
There’s more, but that is going on a private entry.