The Dirty Refrigerator

Long ago, when I was teaching introductory economics, (  would begi the study about how we make choices about how to use our limited resources of time and money. Eventually we would get to more complicated questions, but I would begin with the dirty refrigerator problem. The inspiration for this example came from two weddings and thfee friends.

My youngest daughter was getting married on Saturday. It was Tuesday, and my daughter’s future in-laws were arriving in about 12 hours. They were planning to host a rehearsal dinner at my house and I was madly getting the house ready. Then I got a distress call from work. My colleague was supposed to give a speech in Myrtle Beach, but he had called in sick.  They asked if he could send the speech and they would read it . Apparently, he hadn’t written one. To save our Institute’s reputation, I agreed to write a speech for him, but I had procrastinated too long with my least favorite household task, cleaning the refrigerator. Three of my friends asked how they could help.  Everything is clean, I said, except the refrigerator. They busied themselves with reading expiration dates and filling the trash bag and scrubbing while I retreated to my home office  and wrote the speech.

          .Fast forward to my middle daughter’s wedding. I had left the refrigerator till last once again. The wedding was on Saturday. On Thursday evening. the groom was waving his arms in a fit of Italian exuberance and accidentally knocked his bride off a low wall, leaving her with a sprained ankle. The two of them were scheduled to go to the baker to sample some cakes before finalizing the order.  He wanted her to rest up and hoped that “Doctor Mom” could do that with him. Once again, I had procrastinated on cleaning the refrigerator and the as my three friends came to the rescue.  The only price I paid was years of teasing thereafter.

Back in the classroom, I invited their suggestions. Clean it now? Clean it later? Leave it dirty? Beg or pay for someone to do it for you? Swap it for a different favor?  It was agreed that the new refrigerator was not a good solution, but the other options were worth considering, weighing the costs and benefits of each.

A second family refrigerator even made me expand the possibilities.  My mother was moving from her mobile home to assisted living, and my sister had come to town to help me get ready to sell her home.  She opted, to my great relief, to tackle the refrigerator, Our mother had many great qualities, but housekeeping was never one of them. My sister’s husband  was career army., She had learned housekeeping as an army wife. When she finished after about three hours it could have gone on a showroom floor. My housekeeping standards lay in between. So the question was not binary, to clean or not to clean, but whom to charge with the task and how clean do you want it to be,

Even a simple question of cleaning the refrigerator is nonbinary (more than one option), contextual), and has a range of options about how clean and how much time or money or return favors are you willing to spend?

I am thinking a lot these days about nonbinary choices as well as the contexts in which they occur. If you have any good stories, please share