Really, They're All Undesirable

Around the end of 1999 I found myself driving from Chicago to New Mexico. My employer had told me I had to use nine vacation days by the end of the year or lose them. On a whim I settled on visiting Anne, a woman I knew only from an eBay chat board, to "take her to dinner."

She was an eBay seller (which I had not yet become), mostly of books, and her house and garage were jam packed with books and other merchandise she was listing for sale online.

I spent several days in Alamogordo and had a great time, then headed home.

Soon thereafter she complained on the chat board that she had a lot of chores she needed to do but just kept putting them off. The conversation turned briefly to husbands and wives and job jars. A thought popped into my mind and I emailed Anne, offering to send her a job jar program. She could just install it on her hard drive and enter a list of chores. She could then run the program daily and it would randomly select one of the jobs, conceptually similar to pulling a slip of paper with a written task out of a jar.

She was quite enthusiastic about it, sure that this would get her off the dime. I wrote a simple program in BASIC and emailed her, attaching a BASIC compiler, the program I had written, and instructions regarding installing the program and entering the list of chores.

She had no problem with the installation, and the next day she ran the program for the first time. Up popped "Clean the garage."

She decided the program hated her and never used it again.