Sneaky Women Math

Women stink at math. We all know this, right?

Hah!

It’s a lie. It’s time to dispel that myth once and for all. It’s all a carefully crafted fib perpetuated by the woman’s lobby, R.O.M.B.R.A. (Rule Over Men By Resisting Accounting).

I learned this horrible truth by conducting an in-depth study of brownie points, the wonderful accounting mechanism husbands use to purchase Saturday golf outings, guy’s nights out or long visits to the hardware store.

If you aren’t familiar with brownie points, there are a few simple rules. First of all, only men can accrue them. We get them for anything we do that does not involve tools, autos or sports. Also, they must be used while they are fresh, or your wife will not give you credit.

If we pick up our own wet towel from the floor, we get a brownie point. If we pick up a towel dropped by one of the kids, two points. Coming home on time from golf nets at least two points, and if we touch a dish with the intent to clean, we get at least three brownie points. We get more if we clean windows, bonus points if it’d done well enough that our wives won’t have to redo them. In other words, we get credit for anything except stinking up the bathroom.

Anyway, it all started when I noticed that my wife wasn’t calculating my brownie points properly. It wasn’t my fault! I was doing everything to make sure I got full credit for all of my brownie points. Any time I did anything worth points, I faithfully followed the guy’s rules by announcing it. “Hey, Sandy, did you notice that I cleaned up the cat barf?”

By my reckoning, this alone was worth at least one night of Wednesday Night ESPN baseball.

But when I tried cashing it in, she scowled at me and the beer in my hand. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Usually, if you have surplus brownie points, they aren’t allowed to do that. So I started rattling off my brownie point accomplishments.

“Hey, I cleaned the cat barf, picked hair out of the bath tub drain, and changed two light bulbs this week,”

She crossed her arms, “So, I drove the kids to camp, violin and tennis lessons, registered them for school, mopped the bathroom and kitchen, did seven loads of laundry, washed the dog, consoled your daughter who was fighting with her best friend, put fifteen meals on the table and dealt with an icky call from the orthodontist.”

“But you… uh, you don’t ….” I sputtered.

“Then I scraped the cat barf out of the towel you used, and laundered it.”

“Uh, but, um…”

“And I fixed the plumbing that you promised you’d do for the last three months.”

“Uh.”

I think you can see by this that she clearly broke all of the known rules by doing some sneaky, Enron-type accounting! I fully plan on bringing it up during the next collective bargaining between our unions.

Norm

www.normcowie.com
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