MULTITASKING DINOSAUR

Gender gymnastics in a home run by Tyrannosaurus Rex!

Annie was on her computer messaging to her two favourite blokes without getting their replies mixed up whilst at the same time mixing some flour and eggs to make a cake and stripping the wall, getting ready to redecorate, and popping out to the garden every few minutes to attend to some vital last minute weeding.

Bert (her better half) was quietly snoring on the settee because it had been one of those days and he'd just had to wake up earlier than usual. Now it was nearly noon and he was beginning to wonder, in his dreams, whether the pubs were open yet.

She was singing a little song to herself, "glad to hear you're uncle Tom's better and out of hospital," she typed to one of her favourite blokes and "you should never ask a married woman things like that, but I'll let you off just this once: I'm 40c! Now it's your turn!" she typed to the second. The cake mixture looked just right so she dipped one finger in and licked it, nodded her head and ran out into the garden, still singing.

He sniffed, hiccuped in his sleep, his head rolled to one side and he snored again. It just wasn't fair, a daydream told him, that a man should be expected to do so much on his day off, and maybe, surely by now, hopefully, the pubs were open.

She returned from the garden, glanced at her monitor and giggled. "He'll get over it," she typed, "take my word for it, as soon as she mentions she might be pregnant he'll leap into the air and start counting months on his fingers!" Then she shook her head and typed to her second favourite bloke "It's not that 40c is that big! Pop round and I'll show you if you like! And when you say eight inches floppy I just don't believe you!" And she giggled, and lit the oven using a taper from a gas ring. The automatic ignition had gone wrong and Bert had promised to fix it a good year ago, but the poor soul was so busy these days and anyway he'd only bodge it so that the house exploded when she used it.

She raced out onto the back garden and started agitating the soil around her bedding plants with a small shiny trowel. Gardening, she decided, was therapeutic.

He snuffled and his mouth opened wide enough to catch a herd of elephants, and he snorted again. His dream objected to the very unfairness of life. Here he was, weary to the bone, and what was Annie doing? Nothing, he'd be bound! And didn't he need a drink? How can a man survive without a drink?

Annie typed, "He'll get himself a vasectomy, and then she'd better look at what she does when he's not looking!" and smiled a little smile before typing in the other window, "I know you're in America! That doesn't mean you couldn't at least try and pop round, and no, I won't switch the webcam on and show you! Wait till you see them! Bert might wake up at any moment!"

Then she looked at her watch, sniffed the baking smell that was coming out of the oven and returned to the garden to see to an obstinate dandelion growing out of the lawn.

Bert stood up, his eyes three-quarters shut, and staggered to the toilet. After a considerable amount of splashing (some of which sounded as though it might be onto the floor) he sneezed and returned to his seat, sat down and let his eyes drift shut again. It had been a stinking day! And he'd not been up an hour yet! Where was his damned coffee?

"Annie!" he bawled, loud as sin.

She came trotting in, a smile on her lovely face.

"Bert?" she asked.

"Where's my sodding coffee?"

"It's there. On the table. Where I put it when you asked for it."

"Oh. Then you could have said!"

"I did, my love."

Annie typed, "Bert's an arse and I can type this under his nose and he won't realise. But back to the serious stuff. Do you think he knows it's not his?"

"What you doing with that damned thing?" demanded Bert. "Always tapping away on it. It don't make sense, tapping away at a machine like that! And my coffee's sodding cold!"

"It was warm enough when I gave it to you dear."

"Well it ain't now!

"Then give it a few seconds in the microwave."

"You do it. I ain't got much knowledge about microwaves. We don't have microwaves at work."

She picked the cup up and zapped it for a few seconds in the microwave, handed it him back

"It's like magic," he grunted when his lips discovered the coffee was hot. "They ought to have an anti-microwave to make my lager cool!" he cackled at his own powers of invention.

She returned to the computer. "All right. You tell me how big yours is and I'll tell you about mine," she typed in the second window to her second favourite bloke.

"What's that machine do anyway?" grunted Bert, settling down in his chair. "It's been a bleeding tough day," he added.

"It's recipes," she said. "You get some shut-eye if you're tired, dear, and leave recipe things to my little brain. I'm out to pull a few weeds for ten minutes, then I'll have to see to the cake."

"What cake?" he asked.

"The one in the oven," she replied.

"A cake in the oven? Sure it ain't a bun?" he said and cackled for the second time in as many minutes at his powers to create a joke out of nothing.

"It could be," she replied with mock seriousness. "I've had morning sickness this last couple of days."

"Hey! Whoa there! Come off it!" he spluttered.

"We've not been taking precautions lately, you know," she purred, laughing inside. Precautions this long after the menopause! She bet with herself that he'd swallow it.

"What? Precautions… I thought…." His voice trailed to a standstill.

She turned to her computer. "The prat thinks I'm pregnant, and at my age," she typed. "That's the good thing about the menopause. It's like no other contraceptive I've heard of, not that we need such a thing these days!"

"You're at that damned machine again!" he complained bitterly. "It's rattle, rattle, rattle! And now you say you're pregnant? What am I to make of that, then? We don't want any more kids! You'll have to ditch it! You can't be going through all that at your age!"

"At my age! I like that!" she laughed, and typed: "He even wants me to have a termination! That's how much he's bothered to do his sums!"

"I need to talk to you about this," he muttered, standing up, opening his eyes, wiping them on the back of his hand.

"It's that computer of yours," he began. "Always tapping away at it! No idea who you're talking to. That's what's made you pregnant. All them strangers…"

He walked behind her and stared at the screen, trying to focus blurred eyes on tiny print. "Let's look at all them recipes of yours," he leered. "Let's see what cakes you're supposed to make with them!"

"This is private!" she snapped, and clicked to her minimised the site she was on, banishing the chat box to a little strip at the bottom of the screen.

He didn't know she'd done that. He didn't rightly understand computers. It's what their kids had zapped aliens on and these days they had something broad to do with bands, but he didn't rally know what that meant.

He looked at the screen.

"Who are all these people?" he began, pointing. "Who's that woman just there? The one as looks like she's in a time-warp, all black and white and curling hair? And that fairy? Who's that, all wings and unnatural? And all of them? The witch? Good God, you're talking to witches … no wonder you're going against nature!"

"They're my friends and the pictures only represent them," she began. "You ought to get into it yourself. It'd teach you to multitask."

"Multitask?" he boomed, getting angry at the confusion bubbling away in his atrophied brain. "What's multitask?"

"You'd like it," she teased him. "It means doing several things at the same time. Talking to several people online, maybe, whilst baking a cake and doing some weeding."

"Who wants to do weeding…?" he muttered.

"Not wants, needs to." She was beginning to wonder what he had inside his head in the space where must people had a brain.

He stared more intently at the screen.

"There's you! He almost exploded, a wavering finger pointing at her own image at the top of her home page. "And you're with a bloke, all cuddly and nice! Who the hell is that?"

"Who do you think it is?" she asked, wearily. "Just take a look, Bert. Take a proper look and try to engage at least one brain cell."

"The sod looks like me," he complained. "He looks like me when we got hitched all them years ago."

"That's because it is you," she said, patiently. "It's one of our wedding pictures, cuckoo, and it was taken about a million pints of lager ago when that's what you looked like."

"Why you got me here, then?" he snarled. "I ain't in that sodding computer like them other tarts!"

She shook her head and took him gently by one hand. "You're not in it. I've got this picture because I like it," she said softly. "It shows my smile off very nicely. You could get a page if you liked. Find some friends, talk about stuff. Interesting stuff."

"Pah!" he shouted. "There ain't no interesting stuff in damned computers! I'm off out, for a pint!"

And he stormed out into a grey day, past a neatly weeded garden, with the smell of a baked cake richly in the air, teasing an ancient memory of baked cakes from his boyhood, a memory that had almost flickered out of being.

Annie shook her head and clicked on her computer mouse

"Tell her I say she's to leave the prat," she typed to her first favourite bloke, and to her second, "I'll be at Heathrow this time tomorrow. Don't be late because I fancy doing something really carnal very much indeed!"

Reviews

[Chinmay]

It was very interesting, or better, amusing. But I didn't get the title. Is the husband being reffered to as dinosaur ?

[Peter Rogerson]

That about sums him up. I know I'm a man, but history (and experience) shows that some men expect their wives/ girlfriends/ mothers to wait on them hand and foot while they vanish to the pub for refreshment.