At my house, there exists something called a Gong Show. It exists in the kitchen, and more specifically, in the bottom of the cupboard next to the fridge.
The Gong Show is a plastic affair - and not a very pretty one, as my husband reminds me daily.
Yesterday when he reminded me of this, he was rifling around the bottom of the cupboard next to the fridge looking for a container in which to package up some leftover casserole for work. He was sifting furiously through the plastic: some 894 containers and lids, no two of which seemed to match.
"This is a Gong Show!" he announced, as he announces every day.
Indeed, it is. But oh, how I have tried to make order from the chaos. I have tried to colour-code the plastics. I have tried to sort by size and shape.
I have removed the con-tents of the cupboard and matched what I could and tossed the rest. But still.
The next time the husband went looking for a container in which to place his casserole, the chaos had some-how returned.
"We need a system!" he hollered. "What do other people do with all these things?
This is a Gong Show!"
I decided to ask around, and gave my sister a call.
"Do you have 894 mismatched plastic containers and lids?" I asked.
"Hmm," she said. "Maybe 782. It's crazy. Drives the husband bonkers."
"Have you tried, you know, to establish some order?" I asked.
"Well," she said, "once, I took all the containers and lids out of the cupboard and placed the lids ON the containers. Trouble is, they took up too much space that way. I could only put, oh, 15 back in the cupboard."
I had tried that too, with the same unsatisfactory result.
"Have you tried anything else?" I asked.
"Once," she said, "I wrote numbers on each of the lids, and corresponding numbers on the containers.
That didn't work too well, either. I could never find container No. 39 to go with lid No. 39. Same with lid No. 477 and container No. 150."
I told her to have a nice day, and went back to study the Gong Show.
"Well?" asked the husband the next day. "Do we have a plan?"
I shook my head. He began sifting through the containers and lids, the leftovers at his side.
Some 20 minutes later, he abandoned the exercise, and headed off to work.
The solution, it seems, stared us straight in the face. From now on, we buy our lunch.
