Incentive to Clean My Bedroom

Recently, we decided to dump our AT&T home phone and add WOW phone service to our current cable & internet package. We arranged for the WOW person – they referred to him as “the technician” – to come out last Friday. I panicked a bit because the house was fairly messy. Jim and I have had the bad habit lately of just throwing things into our bedroom and closing the door whenever we needed to straighten up the rest of the house. I assumed, however, that most of this phone installation work would be completed outside. You know, simply unhook our old AT&T wire from the outdoor box, then hook up the new WOW line. Simple stuff. No need to linger in my unkempt house. The technician arrived promptly at 9 o’clock on Friday, and immediately informed me that he would need to access all of our phone jacks in order to set up the new service. Great. One jack is in our pigsty bedroom. While the guy went outside, I scrambled into my room and threw everything from the floor into my closet. The closet ended up about waist deep with clothes, papers, magazines, mail, toys, etc. The WOW guy came back inside and then told me that, by the way, he would also have to go into our attic in order to drop some wires between the walls. Ha ha ha, very funny. The entrance to the attic is through my closet! The same closet that now boasted a towering mound of crap. Maybe he could just scale the mountain of junk in there to reach the attic opening while he was at it. I chuckled nervously, not quite believing that invading my closet was the only way to complete the job. Mark – we were now on a first name basis – assured me that he did indeed have to get into my closet, and he would need space to set up his ladder in there as well. At this point, I just wanted to send him away, as that would have been easier and less embarrassing than letting him actually see my massive pile of debris. I did the only thing I could think of at that moment. I excused myself and pitched everything from my closet over into Jim’s closet. To make a long story short, Mark toiled away in the rafters, around the phone jacks, with the cable lines, and amid the internet wires (which, incidentally, were covered in vast layers of dust) for over 4 hours. He was polite enough never to mention my untidiness. When Jim got home from work, he was pleased and delighted that we finally had better, cheaper phone service, in addition to new cable connections. He raved about how nicely I had organized the bedroom, too. Until he opened his closet door. Guess I should have tossed the stuff back into my closet.