ANDY ROONEY

©2004 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Easy Doesn’t Do It

It’s a welcome relief to find yourself performing some job you know how to do. When I come on an easy one, it keeps me from despair over my ineptness at all the others I don’t know how to do.

Shaving every morning might seem to a woman like a nasty little job for men. The fact is, shaving is easy, quick and men get a sense of accomplishment from it. He is so familiar with the job that he can preview the day’s work while he’s doing it without cutting himself. I know how to shave and I look better after I’ve done it. That’s the most you can ask of a job.

Cutting the grass has not been hard work since the advent of power mowers. The operator directs a machine with whirring blades from a comfortable perch in a saddle behind the engine. The swath a mower cuts as it traverses a lawn becomes satisfyingly wider with each pass, and if there’s anything at all difficult about mowing the lawn now, it’s filling the tank of the mower with gas.

We had four or five inches of snow in Connecticut this week. Shoveling snow is overrated as hard work. All the alarm bells about snow shoveling and heart attacks have added prestige to the shoveler, but I have never once died moving snow with a shovel. I suspect more people die in their sleep on a snowy night than shoveling snow the next morning.

Many of the easy jobs are ones I save for the weekend when I seek the illusion I’m accomplishing something without actually doing any work. Shop-ping, of course, is the number 1 time-spending amusement in the country.

To say, "I’ve got to go to the store" or "I should do the shopping" makes it sound like work, which it isn’t. Shop-ping is almost always an excuse for getting out of the house and away from the work you ought to be doing.

The best jobs to do are ones that look hard but aren’t because you get more credit for doing those. I don’t want to alienate women who do a lot of it, but vacuuming is imitation hard work. There is nothing in any way difficult about rolling a roaring wind ma-chine around a room on its little wheels. The noise it makes seems unnecessary but adds to the suggestion that it’s work.

The only hard part of vacuuming the living room rug is putting the damned vacuum back in the closet when you’ve finished. Vacuum cleaners are unwieldy. If he invented them, Hoover stopped too soon.

Washing the car in the driveway on a spring or summer day is another job that has the reputation of being hard but isn’t. The only hard part of washing the average car is getting to the middle of the windshield with a sponge or cloth without getting your shirt and pants wet where you lean up against the car.

Washing a car is at least a little more difficult and physically taxing than watering the lawn, the hedge or the flowers in the garden. How holding a nozzle with water flowing through it and directing it toward something you want to get wet, ever got to be considered work is a mystery to me. No job I know of is easier, while at the same time providing the person doing it with the satisfying notion that he’s slaking the thirst of vegetation.

This morning, something happened to the computer on which I write. Finally, after a frustrating hour, I called for assistance and the technician came to fix it.

In an effort to help, I brought in a small lamp and put it on the desk near the computer. As I plugged it in, there was that familiar flash indicating the bulb had blown. I went to the closet, came back with a new bulb and screwed it in until it was snug. The bulb glowed. At last, a job I knew how to do: changing a light bulb.

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