The list that landed in my email couldn't have been longer:
My dear, these are your tasks for Passover: You are tasked with cleaning your dresser, the table, the chairs in the kitchen, the microwave, and the cabinets in the living room.
Seven minutes later, the expected completion arrived: the small cabinet under the meat sink, and also 'going over the round shelves in the living room.'.
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I have nothing against work.
On the contrary, as the author Jerome K. Jerome wrote (Three in a Boat), I cannot sit still and watch a man work and suffer. I am immediately filled with a strong desire to get up and supervise his work, to walk around him, with my hands in my pockets, and explain to him what he should do.
I have an active nature and am unable to resist the waves of energy that overwhelm me.
I love the work, I love it. I absolutely adore it. I can sit and watch it for hours on end.
Moreover, I am very careful and watchful of work of any kind. I have a work that I have guarded with the utmost care for years and years and you will not find even the slightest fingerprint on it.
You won't find a person who will protect his work so that it won't be damaged, God forbid.
But despite the importance and prestige of the work to me, I do not tolerate injustice and I do not ask for more than I deserve.
It is not the love of work in me that gives me the status of Uncle Tom, the famous black slave from Stowe's novel, whose sad fate in these days of Passover Eve evokes deep and sorrowful reflections in me, and takes on a whole new meaning for me.
Filled the chairs, even the table, but the small cupboard under the meat sink? The round shelves? Why are they round at all? Who is the strange designer who decided to make round shelves?
While I was longing for a resurrection in which Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King would rise from their graves, I sent a somber email back to my wife and asked for a transfer. That is, a different list.
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I received the next email a few minutes later, with a Word document attached.
""It would have been more convenient to send it that way," the woman explained.
I opened the file, and I recognized that before the work of B. I:
Passover program 2017. Host: Mrs. Hyun, presenters: The Hyun family. Table of contents: the kitchen, the living room, the children's room, the parents' room, the hallway, the closets, the bathroom, the attic, the Doombas and the Expedit [IKEA code names], the beds, the carpets, the sinks, the dishes for Passover, the oven, the refrigerator, the garden, the laundry room, the children's book hive, the toy drawers, the entrance to the house. Appendices.
With trembling hands, I flipped through the appendices.
""Return immediately to Chapter 1," it says in large letters. "There are no shortcuts.".
I'm back.
But then I recognized the words 'subtopics'. Here are some of them. Or as they are more conveniently labeled 1.1. etc. Dishwasher, dryer, kitchen cabinets, tin cabinet, staple and scissors drawers, marble, marble countertops.
The room began to spin around me, and I had difficulty reading the footnotes I was referring to from the body of the text.
With a little effort, I was able to make out the words 'Buy - an orange water squeegee for the meat marble, and a purple water squeegee for the milky marble', '2 mm foil', and 'plastic surfaces for the sink'.
It appears that, despite the particular difficulty, at the end of the day, I will stick to the original list I have.
