Halloween scare

The biggest fright this Halloween for me was the worst thing that any married man can expect to hear uttered by their partner which is:

“What did I just say?”

As usual, I racked my brain to see if my auditory centre had recorded anything which had been said in the preceding 30 seconds. Alas, no. I just kept staring ahead, stirring the gravy rapidly trying to think of what may in fact have been said given the circumstances.

“Take the potatoes out of the oven” I replied not very confidently.

“No.” she replied tersely.

“Carve the chicken?” I suggested with even less conviction.

“No. You never listen….” she sighed.

But the problem is that I really cannot multi-task. It’s impossible. If I am doing something I cannot listen to someone speaking at the same time. And the reason for this is because of my male gender, which was confirmed in a study in BMC Psychology:

Stoet G, O’Connor DB, Conner M, Laws KR. Are women better than men at multi-tasking? BMC Psychology 1, Article Number: 18 (2013)

In this study they found that women do outperform men in some types of multi-tasking. Therefore, the next time my wife complains that I do not listen I will hand her a copy of the pdf of this paper and state that it is my genetic code and in particular my Y chromosome which is at fault. Hopefully that may help to mollify the situation. Maybe.

Postscript

My wife does say that I have two major faults: I never listen and something else.