Wednesday 4 April 2012

Walking the talk

There are several items on my list entitled Things I Will Wait For Someone Else To Do Before Committing To Doing Them Myself. Checking the oil in my car is one of them.

It's not so much the checking of the oil which bothers me. It's what this may lead to, namely identifying a need to top up the oil. This requires various searches on the interweb for instructions only to be faced with smug posts containing patronising comments such as, the fuel cap is under the bonnet. Until I remember that I own a car manual and maybe Google shouldn't always be my first port of call in a crisis.

All of this to-ing and fro-ing annoys me greatly, because surely someone else should be taking care of it. Someone else who is used to this sort of thing. Someone else who is a man. Never mind that I am in possession of an intellect and a capacity to follow instructions in a logical manner (unless sleep-deprived) and if I need to, an ability to figure it out for myself.

I believe in equality for men and women. I believe in healthy relationships between men and women. I want to be a positive role model for my son who, hopefully, will grow up with an outlook that is unrestricted on the basis of his gender. And yet, I'm still waiting to be rescued like some Disney princess. I still don't get it.

Having retrieved the manual from the glove box it took all of 30 seconds to confirm the position of the fuel cap and proceed accordingly. The whole thing was over in substantially less time than it would have taken to pack up the boy and drive to the nearest garage, pleading ignorance. Ridiculous.

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