My roommate said every chore counts the same, so I started treating them that way
I live with four other adults in a rented house, and for the most part it works because we all hate different things. I do the long, gross, annoying chores without much complaining. I am the one who deep cleans the fridge when it starts smelling haunted, takes apart the vacuum when someone inhales a sock, scrubs the shower drain, gets the mystery sludge out of the sink trap, that kind of stuff. Everyone else tends to do the quick visible chores like wiping counters, taking out a trash bag, refilling the Brita, putting stray cups back in the kitchen. It balanced out fine because our old roommate who sort of managed the chore app understood that one awful Saturday job is not the same as eight thirty second tasks. Then she moved in with her girlfriend, and one of my other roommates got very into "fairness" and made a spreadsheet to go with the app. About ten days after I got back from visiting my cousin, he asked for a house meeting and came in acting like he was presenting quarterly earnings. He had totals for everybody. Apparently he had completed 68 chores in six weeks, another roommate had 52, and I had 14. He said it was not personal, but numbers are numbers, and I needed to start doing at least four chores a day untill I "caught up." I honestly thought he was joking. I pointed out that two of my 14 chores were things like defrosting the freezer and fixing the toilet handle, which took actual time, and that his list included gems like "putting the mail in a neat pile" and "changing the hand towel." He said a completed chore is a completed chore and I could not ask for special treatment just because my chores were more complex. Okay. Great. Message recieved. The next afternoon I became an absolute demon of tiny household tasks. I replaced every toilet paper roll that was under half, refilled the soap in both bathrooms, put all the shoes by the door in a straight line, watered the plants, folded the throw blankets, emptied the lint trap, wiped fingerprints off the fridge handles, sorted the random batteries drawer, shook out the doormat, put the coasters back on the coffee table, gathered all the cups from bedrooms, matched stray socks from the dryer, and on and on. I picked only the dumbest, fastest chores on purpose. By bedtime I had logged 31 chores. The next day I did 19 more before lunch. Technically I was crushing it. The house, however, looked kind of insane. The chore board was thriving, but the oven still smoked, the recycling still needed the annoying trip to the dropoff place, and the shower drain was making that glugging demon noise again. One roommate laughed so hard she had to sit down. Another asked why the spreadsheet said we were doing amazing when the house felt worse. That turned into a very short meeting where the whole system got scrapped, and Mr. Numbers admitted maybe not all chores are seperate species of equal effort. I am no longer on "catch up duty," and he has not opened that spreadsheet since.
Posted Apr 6, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC