Men and their stubborn, clueless friend: the ego

I once came across a joke saying that the reason the Israelites were lost in the desert for 40 years was because Moses could not bring himself to ask for directions. This could very well be true!

When I picture that scenario, I can imagine his wife rolling her eyes every one of these 40 days when he went back to their tent and assured her that he had found the right way, that they would be in Canaan by the following week.

“Around Tuesday afternoon, 3pm, latest 5pm,” he would say.

I bet every wife has had the pleasure of meeting her other man, the male ego. Many times, this guy has told my husband to take a ‘short cut’ to beat traffic jams.

My husband of course ignores my good sense when I point out that it is best to stick to the highway since the cars must move eventually, that those short cuts will be clogged for hours since the traffic police do not bother sorting them out. Sure enough, thanks to the ego, we find ourselves slam dunk in hellish traffic for hours, in the middle of narrow, off-road paths.

HELPFUL EGO

“If traffic is this bad here, it must be a nightmare on the main highway.” That is my husband’s ego speaking.  It is then that I close my eyes, take a deep breath and say a prayer.

This ego has put us in trouble more often than I care to count.

For instance, a while back, I told him that the pipe connected to the cistern in the toilet was broken. Instead of calling a plumber, ego advised hubby to ‘fix’ it early in the morning before leaving for work. In the evening, we came home to a flooded bedroom and bathroom.

Then there was the other day when I wished that my phone had that cool feature that says the name of the person calling. Hubby offered to set it up for me, even though I pointed out that my phone does not have this feature.

As you guessed, his ego insisted that it indeed has it, and that he could fix it for me in no time. I was sceptical as I hand over the phone, which made the ego even more determined to prove me wrong. For one hour, phone and hubby engaged in a back and forth.

“What’s wrong with your phone?!” He finally demanded, sounding frustrated. By then, instead of the cool feature, he had set up this annoying setting that loudly reads everything that displays on the screen.

To make matters worse, he somehow disabled the scroll feature, meaning that he could not access any applications. Eventually, the ego grudgingly let our tech savvy pre-teen daughter have a go, even though her dad kept taking it back and fiddling with it.

Finally despairing, he gave it back. It took her just 30 minutes to deactivate the annoying feature, and put the settings back in place. Sigh.