Normaltivity

There is an underlying message in today’s comic, buried within like a nugget of truth hidden amongst the exposition.

Did you find it?

The answer, of course, is *spoiler alert!* that being a good roommate means that everyone pitches in.

On the other hand, if your roommate is a Ninja with a predisposition to violence (and no self-respecting Ninja would not be), perhaps you make some concessions on issues of dish-clearing or even bathroom-scrubbing.

In the meantime, we’ve learned something very important about our friend Robot!  We’ve learned what he does for a living, and, er, allegedly those who make up his target demographic.

Don’t be fooled into the potential fallacy of causation:  A + B does not always equal C.

Although here with us it probably does.  We’re not that clever.

-Dan

—————————————————————————————————————————-

In college, I had this roommate Phil that would always leave our shared bathroom a mess, and leave his dirty dishes in the sink.  For some reason, he kept his own room pristine, but left the common areas a mess, which annoyed me in that special way that only roommates can.  I was just the opposite.  My room was a mess, but I would never leave things out in the common area.  I thought it was simple consideration.

One day, the dishes were piled up to such an extreme that I didn’t have room to cook my lunch.  I asked Phil if he could clear away his dishes, and he told me he’d do the dishes if I cleaned the bathroom.  WTF?!?

Let me add some exposition to Phil for a second.  He is a really nice guy that is very kind and easy to talk to.  He has a calm demeanor about him, and usually was found in his room, soothing himself to Santana.

He asked me to clean the bathroom in that calm and pleasant way that is idiosyncratic to his personality, and had he not been the kind and calm person I know him to be, I probably would have thrown his arm on to a cutting board and chopped off one of his fingers.  I would have, however the cutting board and knife were buried somewhere in his mountain of dishes, and it would be too much of a hassle to dig them out, wash them, get him from his room, wrestle his arm to the board, and then cut it off.  Instead I just told him I’d clean the bathroom.

I did, however, clean the bathroom with his toothbrush.  Phil, if you’re reading this; I am sorry.  Kind of.  But it could have been worse, right?

-Spencer

—————————————————————————————————————————-

I once conducted an experiment with an old roommate – I believe this was also in college.  Like yours, this roommate tended to let dishes and other “common area” items pile up (although to be fair, his room was a mess, too).

Anyway, the crux of the experiment was to see who could go longer – myself or him – in the filth.  I removed the bare essentials that I required (a pot, a pan, a plate, a fork, etc.) and would wash them immediately and return them to my room immediately after eating.  Meanwhile, this roommate would use dishes as he needed them (he didn’t cook that often, so it took a few weeks) and left them stacked in the sink.  As a secondary aspect of this experiment, I left all his food that he did purchase untouched in the refrigerator.

This was probably a mistake.

As you might imagine, I would return to the house one day, greeted by a pungency that I could not remove from the air, no matter how furiously I utilized the air freshener.  I was annoyed, for girls were coming over.

So I ended the experiment, learning a valuable lesson:  my tolerance for filth was much lower than my roommate’s.

Oh!  I almost forgot.  After clearing out the dishes (I of course wore all the appropriate accoutrement – gloves, smock, gas mask), I decided to check the fridge, as well.  What I found was this:

That’s right, our very own penicillin farm.

Sure, it was gross, but oddly enough, neither of us got sick that entire year.

-Dan