If You Want It Done Properly...

It was not to be of course. Perhaps the age of conning other children to do the work which you were supposed to do, was past (even back then). Then again, perhaps we had all been raised on the same stories back then, so, other kids wouldn’t fall for it. Stories unfortunately which most young people today just don’t seem to read (maybe it’s time again for the con?). Despite our biggest hopes, we quickly realized Mark Twain must have been wrong. No child was going to bring us their favourite toy, and take over the scrubbing with the wire brush. It actually hurt, but we continued valiantly (knowing what our father would say if we didn’t). My brother and I were really doing our best. There was the odd comment from people walking past, when observing what we were doing, and after looking about and seeing our parents were  no where about, would ask “Is this a punishment or something?”. We would look at them hopefully. If they didn’t do this to their child during their holidays, maybe they would like to adopt us (kidding)?
It was already heading well into summer and the temperatures were climbing as high as 28 degrees Celsius (about 82.4 Fahrenheit), which for Dunedin was really getting hot. Remember ‘average’ winter temperature was just1degreeC.-(33F) and we won’t go into wind chill factor. However the days were definitely heating up. If, we had got out and started straight after breakfast, we could be finished by lunchtime. And then we could have the afternoon off and the next day doing what we wanted. Had we got straight into the work, and hadn’t wasted any time. Had we started straight away. Generally, we didn’t. We messed around. Delaying the starting. Looking for something to wear on our hands. Debating which brush did a better job. The long handled one, or the short one. Then we had to find our hats. Then we had to examine what we had done yesterday. Then we would hose off the wall to see if we had got it all off. Let’s be honest. We were not trying to do the job properly. We were manually procrastinating. We were definitely not wishing to continue doing the work. So we would waste more time and the day would pass into afternoon.
Then suddenly it would be half way through the afternoon and we had not done any where near the amount of scrubbing we should have. Knowing our father would be home before too long, we would start to rush the scrubbing. Causing more injuries to the back of our hands and consequently stopping more and more often for some form of treatment (Washing the knuckles under cold water). Before long Father would arrive home. Surveying what we had (or more to the point), or had not achieved with the day. The comment that was stated next was still to do with doing the job properly but was more in the form of “If you want something done properly, do it yourself”.
(Continued tomorrow)