A funny story

Or maybe it isn't funny, maybe it's more kind of sad and pathetic. But here it is.

Yesterday at work O. and I were talking about the certain kind of helplessness that is typically found in a certain generation of men. Basically, our fathers' generation. :-) A customer got us to thinking about it. O.'s mother passed away when he was just in his early twenties, and he told me how he and his brother, who had both left home by then, were pretty frustrated by his father being extremely impractical with cooking and things like that which his wife had normally taken care of. This reminded me of a true story from my own life. My mother's still alive of course, so my father hasn't had to learn how to cook. >:-) But he can cook a few things. Like pancakes. Or so I thought.

Back when I lived with my parents, we used to always have pancakes one day a week, the day when my mother worked late. I would get home first and make the batter. It should sit for a while, so I used to leave it until my father got home ... then he would fry enough pancakes for the two of us and we'd eat together. My mother would get home a couple of hours later and fry up the rest of the batter for herself, so she'd get fresh pancakes too. It was a perfect scheme. :-) Then one day the following happened.

I was delayed one day on pancake day, so that I only got home almost an hour after my father did. I sent him a message about it, he said OK, so I figured that by the time I arrived he would have the pancakes ready and we could just eat. But no. Nothing was ready. He was just sitting in his easy chair reading the newspaper. I asked where dinner was, hadn't he made any pancakes? No, of course not. He couldn't. There wasn't any batter ...

So that was kind of messed up, IMO. But this afternoon at the grocery store, the guy ahead of me in line - he was about my father's age, what a coincidence - was buying ready made pancakes. Seriously. They were vacuum packed ... I'm not sure how many were in each package, looked like about ten, and he was getting three or four packages. OH MY FUCKING GOD. What is wrong with people???*

If this is where the bar is set my dad could become a chef in his old age. o_O

*What's wrong with people is that everybody complains that food is so expensive in this country, and then there is actually a market for ready made pancakes. Fuck you, my fellow Norwegians. You need professional help.