Leisure Time

My slave e opened the closet and looked inside.

"One of us has a twisted mind," she said.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll tell this in the proper order.

As she has mentioned here once or twice, e is not particularly fond of doing the laundry. In fact, a couple of our hypnotic effects have been aimed at making up for the drudgery of that part of her day.

But one of our readers, L.E., came up with a brilliant suggestion last week.

"Have you tried developing a 'housework robot' persona for her so she can do the chores as an entity not bothered by them,and then return to herself to find those things done with no memory of having done them?"

Now, I wasn't sure e would go for something like that. It would be a mistake to call her a Puritan, but she usually isn't a big fan of using hypnosis for shortcuts around the inevitable tough parts of life. For instance, I've given her a button she can push for an extra jolt of energy, and another to help her fall back asleep in the middle of the night, but she's not used either very much.

But a laundry robot? She loved the idea immediately. She especially loved getting to decide where she would 'go' while the maid was working.

So after just a bit of discussion, I gave her subconscious a new set of instructions. A robot maid would sit in the closet in the laundry room. When e was confronting a menial task, she could press the green 'start' button', and the maid would take over. Meanwhile, e could turn, walk to the bedroom, and join me in the (previously non-existent) hot tub while the work was being done.

When I finished installing the instructions, e was sitting on the couch. I suggested she go look in the closet

One look, and that's when she accused somebody's mind, either hers or mine, of being twisted. Yep, humming away in the closet was: Rosie, from the Jetsons.

And you know what? Rosie's pretty good, to judge from her first assignment yesterday. After a happy half-hour soak in the hot tub, e returned to the laundry room to find a pile of folded clothes and more in the washer and dryer.

"She's good at matching socks," e said.