So my youngest daughter was over this weekend and told us a funny story of what happened to her this summer.
Daughter and new boyfriend driving home after a long day with some friends and they were discussing what to do for supper. So the daughter says I know this place Joe Joes where we can buy great Italian food and cook it at home. Joe Joes is our family nickname for a restaurant where you can either dine out, or buy packaged food to cook at home. A excellent place the next town over.
So they buy some lasagna, go to her place and she pops it into the oven to cook. They go outside to have some wine then come back into the apartment. As she said we knew something was wrong as soon as we opened the door. Turns out she forgot to take the plastic cover off the lasagna pan. Dinner ruined, it was home delivered pizza that night.
“Never occurred to me to take that off, I never knew Mom always did that” she laughed, “But I will never do that again”.
We had a good laugh at her misfortune, and it occurred to me there is a thread here on the SDMB. Any others have growing pains such as that they experienced ?
I had to learn the hard way that it’s best to be proactive and pay your utility bills when they are actually due instead of waiting until you get a termination notice.
My sixteen year old got himself a job waiting tables and I took him to the bank to deposit some of his earnings into his savings account. He went to the table in the middle of the bank where you do your forms, stared at the savings deposit slip for about a minute and then asked if I could help him. He just had no clue what to do with it.
I didn’t give him any hassle for it (though it seems pretty straight forward) and figured he had to learn somehow and walked him through it. Then he grumbled about the stuff he learns at school but no one ever teaches him anything useful. Just wait until he has to file taxes this spring.
There was a story about a local woman who decided to go to prison and befriend some of the young inmates who were up for parole, to help them get into the “real world.” She found a job for one of them.
He came to her two week’s after his release, showed her his first paycheck, and announced “I got this for working last week. And they told me that, if I work every day this week, I’ll get another one next week.”
He did not know that’s how adulthood in the real work could work.
One of my siblings had lived on his own for almost a year (maybe a little more than one) when he had to deal with a bedbug infestation.
Now, his mattresses were so old that it was easiest to buy some new ones. As part of all this, it was discovered that he had never washed his sheets. It just didn’t occur to him that he could/should.
To be fair, “deposit slips” are on their way out. I am universally recognized as a mature and responsible adult, and I haven’t used one of those in a large number of years.
Well, here’s a third-person story my doctor told me.
I had a bit of, um, hemorrhoid trouble. Doctor prescribed medicated suppositories, which come wrapped in form-fitting heavy aluminum foil. The doctor felt it would be prudent to advise me to remove the foil before use, saying that he once had a middle-aged female patient who somehow didn’t figure that out. :eek:
A few years ago, I had a friend who was shocked that more people didn’t use credit cards. He couldn’t figure out why everyone didn’t sign up for them any chance they got. Apparently he didn’t know you had to pay the money back…with interest. He had to be close to 25 or 26 at the time.
At age 30, my youngest brother had never lived on his own or on a flat he was expected to clean. Do dishes, yes; make his bed, yes; leave the shower pristine once he was finished, yes. Wash the floors or the windows or dust, no. He could cook, but he’d never owned a single pan.
He bought a flat of his own and when he was in the middle of setting it up so he could move in he remarked “I’d never realized how many cleaning supplies are needed, and how much pots and pans cost!”
Apparently my mom’s friend’s son said that biggest learning curve when he moved out on his own was remembering to buy household things like TP and toothpaste. It always seemed to just magically appear at home.
When our boys started high school, we told taught them how to do their laundry (jeans, t-shirts, socks & underwear, etc.) and told them we weren’t doing it for them anymore. No grumbling, 'cause I think it made them feel grown up, at least at first.
Flash forward a couple years, and son#2 goes to a school dance and wears a suit. The next day we find him taking his laundry out of the dryer, including his dry-clean-only suit pants. He had no idea that washing them was bad, and we hadn’t thought about telling him not to.
A few decades ago, a place I worked hired a college student as an intern. He was attending a prestigious private college. Both his parents were college professors.
First revelation: Gosh, this working sure takes the heart out of the day! When do you get a chance to shop and do laundry when you’re in the office 9 to 5?
Second revelation: You don’t get 2 weeks off for Christmas and New Years!?
Had a young guy working for me, he decided paying rent sucked and wanted to buy a house so he asks me “how do you buy a house, do you just find one make payments to the owner?”. I asked him what his credit score looked like, after that got me a blank look we spent some time going over the basics. Must’ve worked, he owns a couple of houses now and is enjoying having people pay him rent.
That one killed me. My first husband was still in college when we married, so all our friends were as well, and they were on holiday break. I was working. It was horrible.
My mom did the same thing to my brother and I when we were in middle school. She also said, “I don’t care if you actually do your laundry but if I find something smelly it’s going in the trash and I’m not paying to replace it.”
Same thing with ironing and doing the dishes more or less.
In high school, (U.S. History II), we were taught to fill out a bank deposit slip and how to do taxes, 1040EZ and 1040A. This was New Jersey, in the 1980’s.
What I didn’t learn until adulthood: Car batteries don’t last forever.
I speak from personal experience - learning to do laundry by trial and error is expensive. OTOH the Darwinian approach of throwing everything into one load and washing it on Hot/Cold quickly weeds out the weaklings, and from them on you save a lot of time on washday.
Likewise no one ever told me how to clean the bathroom, so my method of wiping down the floor, sinks and tub with the used towels seemed perfectly straightforward to me. You are going to wash them anyway - what’s the problem?
I should add that this is not necessarily an attitude that is shared by all members of my household. Fortunately we have worked out a compromise, which amounts to “the bathrooms are clean and I am doing a load of towels - more than that is on a need-to-know basis”.
I hated my 7th grade social studies teacher, but she taught us how to write checks, balance a checkbook, and read (and fold!) a road map. Also in NJ, considerably earlier than the 1980s.
