-Jimmy Dean

I
may not always be the proverbial king of my castle, but I am certainly
the king of my kitchen. Even so, when the Lady of the Castle (my lovely
wife) asks me to do the dishes, I’m totally cool with that. If I’m in
the act of doing them, as I often am, and she has a helpful hint,
that’s fine, too. But heaven forbid, if she tells me to do the dishes
and THEN tells me how to do them, I go completely berserk. Dishes almost
get tossed against the wall and the wife. This is because telling me
what to do plus telling me how to do it somehow hacks into my
psychology’s circuitry and unleashes my hellspawn-husband virus. I’m sorry– it’s terrible. I hate it. But I don’t hate myself, because it’s just the way God made me.

I’m not shifting blame here. In fact, I take full responsibility for having some responsibility. 

My
wife and I have been working on doing a better job seeing things at a
BIG-picture level. Before we blame each other, or other people, we try
to see if there is a better way to design “the system”. The larger
system so often implicitly coerces people into doing crazy things they
don’t want to do. And systems usually obey very predictable behavior. So
really, what I’ve decided to do is take full responsibility for not being in harmony with the system around me. I can either work to change myself, or I can work to change the system, or both. This
strategy has helped save us (me) from countless Catherine Kieu Becker
(the woman who cut off her husband’s penis and threw it in the garbage
disposal). 

I
used to do infrared inspections for a large manufacturing facility
called Bicycle Playing Cards. Un-scheduled equipment breakdowns are
every plant manager’s worst nightmare, so the accountants and engineers
are big proponents of preventative maintenance strategies like infrared.
My mandate was to keep the motors alive or else know exactly when they
would die. 

Of
the thousands of motors that I inspected in the plant, there was one
tiny motor that was far and away more important than every other motor.
It was the lynchpin of the whole factory. If it failed, the whole plant
shut down. It was the vacuum motor! Without the vacuum motor, all the
junk accumulated in the factory and effed-up the whole process. Las
Vegas herself depended on that vacuum motor.

Our kitchen has a
figurative vacuum motor– the lynchpin of the system that could unfasten
bliss at any moment. Working the system backwards, we figured out that
my dishes only needed her special cleaning advice because I didn’t soak
them first. But I didn’t soak mine first because the sink was full of
her dishes because the dishwasher wasn’t emptied. But I couldn’t empty
the dishwasher because there were too many cycling water bottles drying
out on the limited countertop real estate. Water bottles were the
lynchpin! 

What
we needed, therefore, was a better drying mechanism and storage system
for our water bottles. But that would require a larger system change
upstream. Next,
Susie and I sat down at the drawing board to see if we could map out a
better system for our household. Here is the plan we came up within
reverse order.

GOAL = Have more free time and stay married

Step 6) Stop buying (or accepting) junk into our house

Step 5) Deeply, quickly, and even impulsively get rid of the junk we already have

Step 4) Get rid of our TV from TV cabinet 

Step 3) Retrofit TV cabinet into a “recreation locker”

Step 2) Find home for water bottles

Step 1) Empty dishwasher in the morning and load/run it at night