Three Wrongs Don’t Quite Make A Fright

Samoyed
This is a much cleaner and well groomed specimen of our Jazz’s breed.

“While you’re at the shops, buy some clippers,” Tracey told me as I headed out the door.

“Why?”

I was worried she’d decided to start cutting the kids’ hair again. Clippers and scissors are to my wife what hammers and screwdrivers are to me. Last time she attempted to cut hair Master8 took on the physical characteristics of a Dr Seuss character.

“Jazz needs to be shaved for summer,” she said, and I breathed a little easier.

Our dog is a Samoyed and, even though she’s a nice shade of white, she really feels the heat.

“Not shaved,” I reminded my wife. We accidentally said ‘shaved’ to the dog people one year and we got back an unrecognizable, pink, embarrassed (I swear), rat-like creature.

“Clippered then,” she corrected herself.

“And why are we doing this?” We usually have a professional  do the job. It sure didn’t sound like a fun way to spend the afternoon.

“It costs $60. You can pick a cheap set of clippers up for twenty. That’s an easy $40 saved for fifteen minutes work.”

Rather than argue I reminded myself I wouldn’t be the one doing the clippering and bought them. It turns out we were both destined to be wrong today in almost every way possible.

“What. Are. Those?” Master8 demanded to know when I placed the newly acquired gadget on the kitchen bench. His hand involuntarily covered the top of his head.

“Don’t worry, mate, they’re for the dog,” I assured him.

He looked relieved but also didn’t make an appearance for the next hour. I suspect he was hiding under a bed.

“Have fun,” I said to Tracey, going to walk off.

“You’ll need to hold Jazz.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

First of my assumptions smashed.

Fifteen minutes later we hadn’t managed to save a single cent.

“What size attachment do you think?” Tracey wanted to know.

A fair amount of time was spent discussing this and we finally settled on a 3, because that’s what I get at the hair dressers. The decision to change to a 1 was much faster, and the decision after that to switch to a 15mm was quicker still. In the end, with no exchange of words at all, Tracey tossed the attachment idea out the window and just dove in with the clippers.

Half an hour later and all we’d managed to do was give Jazz’s coat the look of cellulite. It’s the second oddest look she’s ever had and I’m guessing we can cross dog grooming off the list of things we might do to earn a few extra bucks when we retire.

So the second assumption was bunk: we not only weren’t going to save money, we had now added the cost of the clippers to the job.

But pleasingly, my final assumption was also proved to be wrong, because we had a great laugh at how utterly, utterly useless at this seemingly simple task we are.

IMG_0061
This was what we did to our poor dog when we accidentally asked for a shave instead of a clip. We didn’t manage to go anywhere near this look today. Thank goodness.

When not over here, Bruce Devereaux hangs out at his ‘BIG FAMILY little income’  Facebook Page.

 ’raising a family on little more than laughs’

2 Comments

What do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.