1 post tagged “mult-task”

If you remember back a couple of days you may remember that I wrote that Mr FD had reversed his usual habit of loosing things on his trips away and this time had left his phone at the airport before he even left? Well, he reverted back to his usual habit in the end. Sad isn't it?

He left his credit card at a pub on the Atherton Tableland (North Queensland) where he stopped for lunch. He was almost back to Cairns when he remembered and so had to turn around and go back for it. At least he remembered. I have spent  a lot of time cancelling credit cards over the years. I have also tracked down mobile phones in taxis in distant cities. We wont go into the effort that went into getting him home from Holland when his passport, briefcase and laptop were stolen in Amsterdam. I had this vision that his plane would finally land in Brisbane and a door would open, and Mr FD thrown out onto the tarmac. He would be naked except for a little tag hung around his neck, saying Please Return to Australia.

Of course on the home front he cannot be trusted to switch the stove off, and is under severe instructions not to walk away from the coffee machine when he is making his coffee. We have already had one explosion and we are onto our second machine! I long ago bought an iron that switches off after 15 minutes of non movement. In the very first years of marriage he was banned from putting bottles of beer and the like in the freezer to chill quickly as I got tired of cleaning beer and glass fragments from the frozen peas.

We have lost count of the books he has donated to airlines, the bottles of after shave left in motel bathrooms and the underpants left under motel beds.

I put most of this down to the fact that men cannot multitask. Sorry, but it is true, I have living proof. They really can only master one thing at a time. They may do that one thing really well, but ask for a second task to go alongside and chaos ensures. For Mr FD the other task is speaking. He talks. He talks all day. He talks at night, even in his sleep as told previously. He talks over other people. He is perpetually in conversation, often with himself as I have tuned out long ago, but he rarely notices. So if he is speaking, he forgets to pay attention to all the other stuff - like credit cards, phones, luggage, coffee machines. And so the loss ensures.Or the explosion.

Luckily he has a great sense of direction and somehow manages to always find his way home. It probably helps that our house is in a totally different style to every other house in the street!