Guy things. Everybody knows there are certain things that despite equal rights and political correctness are still associated with guys. These things may vary from place to place but they are recognizable to anyone that happens to take notice. For example, the garage is generally considered a guy’s place. The floor jack is a guy thing. Some would argue that the TV remote is a guy thing. Usually the lawnmower is a guy thing.
There are also things considered to be girl things. These things too may vary from place to place but as with guy things they are recognizable as girl things when observed. Examples are a closet full of shoes, or frilly doilies on the furniture. Even the furniture is generally considered the realm of the woman in the home. Yes, I stipulate that there are exceptions to every example given, but looking at it from a distance we know it to be true.
In my office there is a network of computers, all working hard to help me do what I do. They are connected to the internet, each one has specific functions, perform scheduled tasks and when asked, even entertain, educate, or clarify what ever I am working on at the time. My office is without question a guy room.
At the other end of our home is a room that used to be a bedroom. It was conscripted a few years back as a sewing room. Or perhaps (cue the scary music) more accurately a quilting room. There are sewing machines, cutting tables, plastic bins of material, tools and weapons I can’t even describe but according to my wife, no quilter would be caught dead without them. And by the way, I stand corrected, it is Quilter, capital Q not quilter. This is undeniably a girl room and one that I refuse to enter except in the event of an emergency.
For several years now these two rooms have been like separate countries. The borders inviolate. Entry to either was by invitation only. But now comes the sixth biennial Disconnected Piecers Quilt Guild quilt show at the Cultural Center of which my wife is one of the organizers. This means she is tasked with not only preparing some of her quilts for display, but contacting vendors, registering participants, logging in entries and arranging for supplies. How can she do all this and get it ready by the show date of January 27th? You guessed it. Like an invading horde she moves into my office and fires up one of the computers that now becomes quilt central control.
She fires up MS Access and prepares databases of entries and registrants. Excel spread sheets fly from the printer with vendor positions and products. MS Word is sucking ink from the printer with the number of confirmation letters being sent out. MS Publisher is creating show fliers, brochures and press releases. Emails fly through cyberspace at lightning speed.
My computers miss me. I briefly consider a counter attack that would invade her quilting room, but a glance through the door at the tons of material, binding, fat quarters (Martha, is that like thirty cents?) quilt hangers, pillow cases, and other unknown items and I am afraid.
Now an even more horrifying event takes place in my guy room. She begins to create labels and prints them off so she can sew them into the quilts she is working on. Can you believe my computers, my links with the world, my contacts with other computer techs have been reduced to preparing pieces of a quilt? It doesn’t stop there. Now she is printing off designs she has created on MY computers onto fabric and making them part of her quilts. Does that mean MY computers have become quilters? Say it isn’t so.
But the worst is yet to come. I come home one evening and find my wife in the office, peering intently at a monitor, and I ask what is so fascinating. She excitedly tells me that she just used MY computer to purchase over the internet something called the Ultimate Box. First I thought she had bought herself a computer to use in HER room. Imagine my angst when she explained that the Ultimate Box was a device to be hooked up to MY computers that would allow her to take quilt designs from around the world, download them from the internet to MY computer and then into the Ultimate Box which would convert them to a format that could be read by HER SEWING MACHINE so she could sew even more elaborate quilts and win even more ribbons and awards. There will be my office network, several PC’s and a sewing machine, all talking happily to each other.
Guy things, if only they truly were.
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Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books
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Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books
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