Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 17:24:45 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: nate@sri.MT.net (Nate Williams) Cc: terry@lambert.org, nate@sri.MT.net, chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: The lawn-mower story Message-ID: <199606080024.RAA04645@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199606072349.RAA01472@rocky.sri.MT.net> from "Nate Williams" at Jun 7, 96 05:49:26 pm
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> > He also suggests that as part of your commitment to the partnership, > > that you either mow the lawn in its entirety, or you don't mow it > > at all, to save your wife the frustration of not knowing that, once > > you have started mowing, you will have finished mowing in a reasonable > > period of time. > > All of these 'commitments' are in place already, but aren't being > followed. The problem is that they *aren't* followed, not that they > aren't in place. How to you enforce the unfollowed policies? Well, there are two errors here, then: yours, for not finishing, and your wive's, for not waiting for you to finish to go clipping. The simplest way to enforce unfollowed policies is to specifically absolve your wife of any blame for your clipped-but-not-mowed lawn looking silly, if the policy allows her to clip before you're done mowing. A better way would be to make the clipping a dependent function of mowing the lawn as part of the protocol, and not only not expect your wife to clip the lawn before you are done mowing, but to decide that clipping is only OK after mowing. > I'm not following up my end, and people still drive by my house and look > at my lawn. I can't stop that (and really shouldn't since I live in a > 'free-lawn' neighberhood where lawns are all freely viewed by one > another. :) Well, what if there is a neighbor (John Locke? 8-)) who is willing to stand in front of your house if you tell him you are going to mow, and won't budge until you tell him you are done mowing (it's up to you to not lie to him; he only stands in the front, he doesn't look at the back). When people drive by, he waves his hands frantically an screams "Don't look at the lawn! Don't look at the lawn!" to keep people from being offended. Luckily, in your neighborhood, this is enough to satisfy the covenants that are attached to your deed regarding upkeep of your lawn, which you signed when you volunteered to live in the neighborhood. 8-). Now, if there is only one of these guys living on a block, and there are several people who want to mow their lawns (including Al, who threw four touchdowns in a single game, and never went to college, and whose wrist is bigger around than your neck), then we can probably trust peer-pressure to make you finish mowing in a reasonable time, letting John go stand and scream in front of Al's house. At the very least, John is loud enough that everyone knows where he is at all times, so they can ding your doorbell incessantly until you get up from the NBA finals and come to some agreement on how long you are going to hold onto John. As a favor, John is willing to tell your wife "it's OK to clip now" (mostly because he loves saying "it's OK to clip now" almost as much as he loves shouting "resistance is useless!") after you tell him you are done mowing. This lets her mutter "it's ABOUT TIME" at John instead of you (hurray! the marriage is saved 8-)). > > ....it will take a commitment on your > > part and your wife's part to keep the happy cocker-spaniels of the > > world happy (even if it does nothing for their bladder control). > > Yep, but having a committment was never the problem. Keeping the > committment in the face of adversity is the problem. Peer pressure, pure and simple. Plus, you look like an idiot, what with John expiring on your lawn after a week or so of hand-waving with no food or water. Much worse than if your lawn just looked silly. 8-). > (And BTW, it's Jenny the yellow-lab puppy whose now 11 weeks old :) Good... I don't much like cocker-spaniels. On the other hand, labs are pretty large, to get sucked into mowers, and they generally don't fit through dog-doors, so I guess it's a trade-off. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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