The fair and industrious Trudy clears the dining room table, making room for her computer and the stack of paperwork necessary for the annual ritual of doing the taxes.
“Honey?” she asks.
I am sitting in the other room reading about vector space direct sums and thinking about cosets, because I’ve never been happy with the typical definition of cosets, and I’ve finally begun to get the kernel of an idea how you might explain them to mere mortals, and … my train of thought is interrupted by my industrious wife.
“Honey?” she asks, “Do you know the admin password to my laptop?”
I set down my book, get up from my chair, and walk into the dining room. She’s upgrading to TurboTax 2016 and needs the admin credentials to install it.
I tell her the admin username which she types in. And I tell her the admin password.
“Oh,” she says. “I would have never remembered that!”
The system accepts the credentials and TurboTax begins installing.
“Yay!” Trudy cheers. (You see, in some pathological way that I’ve never understood, she actually enjoys this tax preparation ritual, whence the moniker, industrious.)
Then she looks up at me.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you,” she says, tongue in cheek. “See? I need you!”
“Right.” I say. “That’s my plan. I keep all the passwords to myself to ensure that my wife needs me.”
She returns to TurboTax. I return to the vector spaces. And our Sunday proceeds apace.