Dave Barry has the cure for what ails the upwardly mobile set:
Have you ever wondered why the entire world runs so smoothly? The answer is: Guys.
Don't get me wrong: I have the deepest respect for women. My own wife is a woman. But when things need to get done, you cannot beat the results you get when guys swing into action.
For an excellent example, we turn now to a news story from The Greenville (S.C.) News, written by John Boyanoski and sent in by alert reader Michael Ester. The story concerns a guy -- let's call him Guy A -- who had a problem: There were leaves in his yard. So he fired up his leaf blower.
Leaf blowers are the ideal guy tool, because they have engines, they're loud, and they enable you to blast debris, ray-gun-style, from one place to another without having to actually pick it up. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in America, there's a guy who, at least once, cleaned his living room by firing up his leaf blower indoors and blasting everything -- pizza boxes, beer cans, ancient potato-chip shards, underwear, deceased spiders -- into a less-critical area, such as the dining room. (This guy is not married.)
But getting back to our story, which I am not making up: Guy A, taking action, used his leaf blower to blow the leaves off of his property. Problem solved!
Except that the leaves wound up in the yard of another guy. Let's call him Guy B. He now had leaves in HIS yard. What do you think he should have done about this? Should he have asked Guy A, politely but firmly, to remove the leaves? Should he have avoided a potential confrontation by picking them up himself? Or should he have decided that life is too short to be bothered by this kind of petty annoyance, and simply ignored the leaves?
If you answered ''yes'' to any of these solutions, you are, with all due respect, a woman. What Guy B did, according to the Greenville County sheriff's department report, was the same thing that roughly 175 percent of the guys reading this column would have done: He fired up HIS leaf blower, and he blew the leaves back onto the yard of Guy A.
Go read the whole thing for yourself.
