Sign - Teenage Daughter's Bedroom Door
From a sign I recently posted to my teenage daughter's bedroom door:
Welcome to your room! Please take a few minutes to familiarize
yourself with these instructions, which, like all of your father's
rules, are designed to make your stay in his house comfortable and
less inconvenient to his life.
ROOM ACCESS: When you first enter the room, you'll notice that
you'll have some trouble pushing the door into its fully open
position. This is because you've elected to ignore the drawers and
closet space provided for you, instead organizing all of your clothing
in large heaps on the floor. I've given up trying to change your
ways, so I've decided to make the best of the situation and assign
your bedroom as sleeping space for our new puppy, who has proven so
difficult to housebreak. Yours is the only room in the house where I
can be reasonably sure it won't ruin the carpet.
MAID SERVICE: Please note that we do not provide maid service for
you, and even if we did I'm not sure a maid would be up to the task of
making your bed. Your covers appear to have been run through a tree
shredder--how you manage to sleep underneath what looks like a beaver
dam is anybody's guess. Apparently you don't have enough time in the
mornings to straighten your blankets, so I've decided to get you up
each morning a full fifteen minutes earlier than the day before, until
we find an hour that affords you the opportunity to address the
situation. This will continue as unbroken process until I am waking
you up before you've even gone to bed. If you think I'm bluffing, you
probably don't remember that when you were a baby, you woke me up at
four thirty every single morning for a year.
BATHROOM: Speaking of mornings, you and your teenage sister have
been playing out the same drama over the bathroom every weekday for as
long as I can remember. It's a longer-running show than Cats, and it
always climaxes with one of you standing in the hallway and screaming
at the other. To preclude even one more encore presentation of "I
Need To Use The Bathroom You've Been In There An Hour Hurry Up You're
Making Me Late," I've done something rather innovative to the bathroom
door: I've removed it.
GUESTS: Your room is your "property," as you often state, to the
same extent as your contribution to the house payment, which is to
say, zero percent. Still, you can have anyone you want in your room,
as long as the person doesn't have any personality defects, such as
"male."
CURFEW: We have, by my calculations, spent over two hundred man
hours arguing about curfew, which I always want to be "early" and you
prefer to be "never." The whole exercise was, in my opinion, a real
waste of breath, since you ignore the rules anyway. Apparently--and I
cannot fault your logic here--you believe that if you just stay out
late enough, I'll fall asleep and you can claim you were home in time
and didn't want to wake me. To resolve this matter, when you're out
on a date, I'll stretch out in your bed and wait for you to return.
If I fall asleep, I imagine you'll decide it's okay to wake me up when
you get home.
INCENSE: Recently you've taken to filling the atmosphere with
strawberry-flavored pollution. Unfortunately, as is true with the
music you listen to, the walls of your room don't prevent your tastes
from leaking out into other people's senses. In fact, it sounds and
smells as if the band has been playing so loudly they've set their
instruments on fire. This is why I've put an exhaust fan in your room
with the on/off switch in mine.
Of course, there is a more simple way to handle this: You're of
legal age, now, you could just move out. I suppose it's inevitable
that you're going to be doing so anyway. And then these rules will be
unnecessary. Yet somehow I don't think I'll be happier; after nearly
two decades of living with you, I sort of like having you around.
~ Bruce Cameron ~
[ by
W. Bruce Cameron Copyright © 2007, (bruce@wbrucecameron.com) -- {used with permission} ]
Inspirational Humor
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