Housed

Today I sent my wife into the great outdoors, armed with a digital camera and an internet connection, and waited. Five hours later, we had a rental agreement signed and a flat in Chinatown, looking out across Singapore. This was a marked improvement to the last time I went house hunting in Singapore (four days of panic, rage, and no house at all), and suggests that the lightness of a woman’s touch was all that was needed to solve my intractable housing problem.

Rather than look at eleven unsuitable properties and one that was just-about-ok, my wife got shown one ok property, one that exceeded our expectations, and another that was probably ok but had no air conditioning installed. In the third case, they’d exchanged cool air for the dubious amenity of a massive building site on the opposite side of the road, so that probably wasn’t going to be top of the list.

Our new flat (as long as nothing goes horribly wrong in the next seven days) is on the top floor of an HDB, at the far end of the corridor, and we have no neighbours apart from a stairwell. Unless Singaporeans are given to holding sexy staircase parties, that means we should be guaranteed peace and quiet. Unless somebody decides to raise the roof.

And, to allay my previous fears, there are floorboards and lightswitches aplenty in our new flat. What more could we want?

I had continuing minor frustrations at work; other things broke, or turned out to not have been fixed as well as I would have liked, but on the positive side, I managed to fix some things that had been broken for a month that nobody had known how to fix. On the one side this makes me feel like The Greatest Software Engineer That Has Ever Lived, and on the other I wish that things were less fragile, and that I could concentrate on the job I’m actually being paid to do, rather than doing the job somebody else was paid to do, but didn’t.

In between these things, I read a wonderful post on technology, gender inequality and Japanese toilets: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/life-with-and-without-animated.html I refrained from posting a reply, on the basis that if I said “yes, but you don’t need to replace domestic drudgery with technology – that’s what we have poorly paid overworked domestic servants from South East Asia for” then people might take me to be some kind of horrible, evil person who condones making people work 30 days every month and possibly beating them with a stick when they don’t climb out the window of my 30th floor apartment to clean the exterior.

I’m not the kind of horrible, evil person who condones making people work 30 days every month and possibly beating them with a stick when they don’t climb out the window of my 30th floor apartment to clean the exterior.

And that’s not just because I only live on the 17th floor of a building right now.

It also made me consider the importance of the washing machine, which I never had before. It’s a sometimes controversial notion, but it can be hypothesized that if we didn’t have washing machines, we wouldn’t have had female suffrage, because women would be stuck in a life of domestic drudgery that took up so much of their time that they never had a chance to organize themselves and push for equal rights. You might be able to argue for fairness and equality after you’ve spent three hours bashing a shirt against a rock in a river, but you’d be a better man than me. A better woman than me? Hmm.

One thing that makes me believe is that if you hear politicians weighing in on the evils of combined washer dryers, you should watch carefully, and another thing is that if you’re going to be a good person, maybe it’s best to let the person who cooks and cleans for you have a few hours off every week. Or perhaps that leads to Bolshevism. Er. Socialism. Er, a campaign to give residency rights to somebody who works in a country for 25 years for a pittance. Is that the future, or a longed for ideal past?