Having stood under the gentle flow of hot water organising thoughts, scrubbing behind my ears, and sudsing every crevice, I emerge each morning physically and spiritually cleansed.
Joy insists that this is the optimal time to work up a fresh sweat by cleaning the shower itself.
This strikes me as poor workflow design.
The official explanation has something to do with water marks and longevity.
This may even be true.
My objection is philosophical.
The process, as I understand it, is as follows:
First, I must rinse the shower glass with the shower head. Thus redistributing the water droplets deposited on the glass by the same shower head approximately thirty seconds previously.
Then I must wipe the glass using a damp cloth. The source of this dampness is suspiciously familiar.
Finally, I polish the glass dry.
I can’t be the only one capable of the observation that the process appears to involve removing water with water before removing the resulting moisture with moisture.
Why can I not proceed directly to the dry cloth?
Has anybody conducted trials on the more complicated process? Was there a control group? Has the methodology been peer reviewed?
I do not suggest that you should ask these questions of Joy. These questions will not be well received.
The shower-cleaning process has long since escaped the realm of practical housekeeping and entered the realm of ritual.
A ritual differs from a task in one important respect.
A task has an objective; A ritual has a procedure.
The objective may still exist somewhere in the background, but over time it becomes secondary to performing the correct actions in the correct order.
I suspect many domestic routines eventually arrive at this logical void.
Nobody remembers exactly why we started doing the thing.
We simply know that this is how the thing is done.
Questioning the process therefore creates unnecessary friction.
And so I clean the shower.
Not because I have been convinced, but because some battles are not worth having while girded only by a towel.
Anyway.
I missed a water spot.