Tonight is Friday. I have been scared by Oprah into doing some housework. I TiVo Oprah in the hopes that I’ll find an amusing episode. Most of the time Oprah is just too cheesy for me. Well this episode was about true Messies. A woman in California had written in for help. Her Condo was out of control. Oprah, true to form flew in 2 British women to assess the mess, swab it and count the e-coli and then get a team of experts to clean up this woman’s mess.
The women were promoting their new show on Lifetime called… How Messy is our House? or words to that effect. (The shock of the woman’s house has erased all other memories of this episode.)
Well the sight of this woman’s house shocked me speechless. In fact I had to pause Oprah to go and clean my kitchen. Heaven forbid my pile of unwashed dishes should not make it to the dishwasher. I even made Kevin look at the woman’s mess. He scuttled away to do some surfing.
The woman had decided after her 6th divorce and after a lifetime of being a perfectionist and a Neatnik not to pick up anything, or throw anything away for 2 years – food, newspaper, clothes and animal poo. Ugh! Instead of washing her clothes she would just buy new ones. The master bedroom bathroom was filled with old fermenting doggie doo doo. She hadn’t even cleaned her toilet bowl for 2 years. Have you any idea what that looks like?
True to form Oprah immediately diagnoses the problem (despite the one British lady saying "I am sorry but you’re a slob") "there must be something wrong with you on the inside if your house looks like that!" Good on you Oprah. Immediately the Lady Slob is talking about low self esteem, and finally admits to being depressed when asked directly.
The Brit team tackle the mess, after doing the E-coli count and the woman is handed a nice clean and tidy Condo. Oprah interviews a doctor who deals with people with hording disorders. Yes, there has to be a disorder! Eventually she asks no begs the woman to get help. We hear that the woman has no health insurance (she is extremely well groomed). I keep expecting to hear tarantarahh Oprah gives away free psycho therapy sessions!
What a traumatic episode. Not only was I galvanized into cleaning my kitchen I’ve set the Roomba loose in the TV room for the first time in, well ages.
One response to “Oprah shocks me into doing housework”
Hey Sal
The 2 Brits are the ladies from “How clean is your house?” and they usually come armed with feather-trimmed pink rubber gloves – they are a hoot! There are aparently a lot of UK houses that need their tender minstrations…
Last week there was a show on here called “The world’s dirtiest houses” or something and that actually made me and Nick spend the entire weekend cleaning. In the first house, this couple had collected exotic pets – you name it, they had it – and had then stopped feeding some of them so by the time the cops came, there were all these dead animals in cages. But worse, there were some animal corpses… IN THEIR BEDROOM!! They were sleeping in that stench! Then there was a house that had been repossessed and you went in with the cleaning team to see the carnage. Clearly they knew they were about to be thrown out and they blocked up the toilet till it overflowed raw sewerage all the way down the stairs and they then used the furniture & carpet for toilets. Unbelievable. Somewhere in the middle there was a guy with a form of OCD – he felt he had to collect other people’s rubbish. So the ENTIRE house was full of decaying bags of garbage which he had opened and attempted to sort a bit – all the KFC bozes over here, all used disposable nappies over here. I kid you not. But last was the not-so-dirty-but-really-scary story about a house in the US where the freezer was leaking water under the kitchen tiles, which started buckling. When they lifted the tiles, they found a black mould underneath which turned out to be poisonous – the mother and the daughter were violently ill from it and it took doctors ages to figure out what was wrong – it was apparently a reaction to the mould spores. By then, the spores were all over the house and they had to lock the house and leave – had to leave all their clothing & soft furnishings as well. The house is still standing but is uninhabitable – you have to wear a containmnent suit to go in. And appaently this is a known phenomenon in the US – millions of $$ of insurance money gets paid out and houses get broken down because of it!!
So best you use that Roomba (sounds like the Oompa Loompas from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory…) every single day!!