Fredericton — Local man Pete Anderson, 32, is an expert in all things technological and manual, but for the life of him, he just can’t seem to work the damned vacuum cleaner.
“If you need a phone fixed? He’s your guy. If you’re wondering about a weird sound the air conditioner’s making? He can pinpoint it and sort it out in seconds. And he built his own computer that runs more smoothly than any you can buy in a store. But run a vacuum cleaner? Forget about it,” said girlfriend Kelly Harmond.
“If you ask him to vacuum, he just gets annoyed, sighs a lot, says he has more important things to do, then fiddles with the switch and fumbles with the cord, and struggles to haul the contraption upstairs. It’s quite interesting to me that he’s beaten every computer game in existence but he can’t push a vacuum with any level of proficiency at all.
“It’s not just the vacuum, either — he has a mental block when it comes to all cleaning or cooking. I asked him to scrub the toilets, and after a lot of saying he was just about to go do something productive and I couldn’t have asked him at a worse time, he poured a bunch of Windex into a bucket and proceeded to dump it in the toilet.
“I swear — the smartest, most competent guys become idiots the second you ask them for help with basic chores.”
Harmond said she was craving mashed potatoes last week and asked her boyfriend to make them as part of supper.
“He acted like he’d never seen a stove before — this is the guy who restored an old motorcycle in the spring — and he just started grumpily throwing unpeeled potatoes into a pot of water, then let it boil over everywhere while he went off to watch YouTube videos.”
Anderson, for his part, claims the problem isn’t with his ability or lack thereof to do dishes or water plants — it’s that he’s not convinced these things need to be done at all.
“She just did laundry last week, and now she wants it done again?!” he scoffed. “And I think I remember cleaning the bathroom in the winter — why’s she so obsessed with cleaning the bathroom all the time? Do we have to do it every year, for god’s sake?”
At press time, Harmond had asked her boyfriend to weed their vegetable garden, but he begged off because he was in too deep into his farming video game.