Years ago, when I was in college and spending summers and holidays working for Mayflower, I had a fellow mover who was rather depressive and unlucky. Some even called him a 'loser'. His wife had left him and his life had fallen apart -- not necessarily in that order -- and he had lost his office job and started moving furniture for Mayflower, apparently not just for the summer but as a long-term plan, though he didn't last long.

He was also trying to avoid being evicted from his apartment. What happened was that someone rang his doorbell, his cat slipped out and ran away when he opened the door, and he went out looking for it. It took an hour or so to catch the cat, and he forgot that he had been filling up the bathtub when the doorbell rang. When he got back home there was an inch or two of water in his apartment, even more in the apartment downstairs, and his downstairs neighbor was screaming and banging on his door.

So far, a very commonplace story. In fact, just a few years later, I personally experienced pretty much the same series of events, with myself as the downstairs neighbor. What particularly impressed me was his matter-of-fact explanation for why he was filling his bathtub. It wasn't that he was planning to take a bath, but that he didn't like to wash dishes more than once a week, and it was more efficient to do so all at once in the bathtub -- basic principles of hygiene be damned.

I had forgotten this story until some blogger whose name I've forgotten linked to this entry on Views from the Outside.