Welcome to 2025, a year that is already starting to make us long for 2024. That is because 2025 promises to be interesting in the same way that root canal surgery is interesting, except without the anaesthetic.
For start, we have the second coming of President Trump to look forward to, which is a bit like finding out that destroying the One Ring didn’t actually kill Sauron, and he is now president. There might be some pluses though – there is a fair to good chance that Trump will have Kevin Rudd arrested, and – here’s the good bit – we have an extradition treaty with the US, so if he escapes we should have no trouble sending him back.
Worse, we have an election coming up, which means we are about to be blasted with leaflets, emails, text messages and appallingly insincere television commercials involving the sort of actors that can’t even get a shot as an extra on Home and Away telling us that they and their entire family will be living in a wheelie bin floating in a sewage processing plant if (insert random political party here) gets elected. Plus, I expect sentences to get much longer this year. (Sentences in articles that is, not criminal sentences) (Also criminal sentences).
So I am going to try to ignore the start of this year by focusing on successes last year, starting with the fact that I got my wife the perfect Christmas present. Really. It is stylish, practical, fashionable and it definitely doesn’t make her bum look big.
I got her a toilet.
I know, you are kicking yourself for not getting your significant other such a great present, but I really can’t take credit for the idea; it actually came from my wife, who gave me the hint. She said, “The downstairs toilet is leaking; we need a new one.”
This did not surprise me, because it was a few days before Christmas, and that is when essential household appliances and infrastructure tend to break. I used to think they were made this way, in a pact between manufacturers and tradesmen, so that maximum prices could be charged for new ones and their installation.
I mean, let’s face it – if you have your entire family coming over on Christmas Day to eat twice their body weight in rich and fatty foods, you want as many working toilets in your house as it can possibly hold. So you are going to pay anything, up to and including a kidney, to get a new toilet at this time.
Now that I know – as explained in a previous column – that appliances are connected to the internet, I think the appliances plan it themselves. They’ve streamed The Terminator, they know how this works, and they are practising for when they take over the Earth.
For example, just a week or so before the toilet broke, our dishwasher went on the blink. Coincidence? Or did it see what happened to the old fridge and decide to get revenge?
In any event, we now needed a new dishwasher, and based on the hassle involved in going to the appliance store to get the fridge, we decided to order the dishwasher on-line.
At this point, those reading this who have experience ordering on-line are screaming, “No! Don’t go in there!” the way you do when watching a horror movie or seeing someone going into a cinema which is showing an Adam Sandler film.
Actually, the ordering was easy; we clicked on the picture of the dishwasher we wanted, provided all the details we had previously provided when we got our fridge, and were informed that we would get a text letting us know when our dishwasher would be coming.
The next day we did indeed get a text, informing us that our dishwasher would be coming last week. This could mean one of two things: either the appliances had made great strides in their efforts to create the time machine from Terminator, or there was a stuff-up; at this point I considered both outcomes equally plausible.
Thankfully, after only an hour or so, we were able to get that sorted and soon received a delivery date that was not in the past – which, being a big fan of the Terminator movies, I found quite relieving.
On the appointed day I waited at home and activated the handy tracking app, which was unable to locate our dishwasher. I called the store and got to speak to a real person straight away, and after picking myself up off the floor explained the situation.
“Did you order on-line?” said the assistant hopefully. “Er, yes…” I replied, a lot less hopefully, given the excitement building in his voice.
“Ah!” he said, with the same sense of relief that I felt when discovering that dishwashers were not (yet) terminators. “I’ll switch you through to the on-line people! Ha ha ha ha!” OK, he didn’t actually laugh out loud, but I am sure he did in his head.
Twenty-five minutes of mind-numbing on-hold music later, I was advised by one of the on-line people that the reason I could not track my order is that the dishwasher had not been ordered, and indeed the warehouse didn’t have any. I asked if she could get one from the future to travel back for us, but she didn’t seem to follow.
She did begin to suspect that I might be crazy, however, and decided to help me out so that she didn’t have to talk to me again (my voice may have acquired a slightly shrill and unnerving tone by that point).
So we finally got a new dishwasher and, two days later, got to use it when the installers finally arrived (you can’t install your own dishwasher, you need a licensed tradie to do it. Seriously.) It works fine, but sometimes hums late at night, and I have begun to wonder if it and the fridge are planning something; but I no longer have to wash the dishes by hand, which at this point seems a fair trade-off for a new world order led by machines.
Finally, before anyone writes nasty letters, I didn’t just get my wife a toilet for Christmas. I also got her a new brush to clean it with; I’m not a monster.
© Shane Budden 2025
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