Labor-Saving in the Home

Household chores are never done. Ask any housewife or any person who does household chores and he or she will tell you so. There are so many things to be done at home and when they are done more things need to be done. There are the daily chores of sweeping the floor, washing the clothes and most tedious of all, cooking and food. Also there are chores that are done weekly, monthly or like spring cleaning, perhaps annually. Whatever they are, chores take a lot of energy to do. Thus labor-saving devices or methods are always welcome.

Labor-Saving Devices

We do have many labors-saving devices and methods nowadays compared to perhaps just fifty years ago. My grandfather used to tell me how he had to go into the forest to look for firewood everyday. If the weather was bad or he could not find any, it meant that his mother could not cook any food and they had to eat whatever was edible raw. Today we have the convenience of cooking-gas. This labor-saving device is so much taken for granted that we do not realize how much more difficult cooking will be without it.

Furthermore cooking with gas is much cleaner than using firewood. The pots and pans do not become black with soot. So that saves a lot of time and energy otherwise spent on cleaning these utensils.

No More Messy Work

When my mother was a child she paid most things had to be done from scratch. Her mother and she had to scrape their own coconut, mix their own curry powder, slaughter their own chicken and do a dozen other things by themselves just to cook a meal. On top of that they had to make sure they had enough firewood to stoke the fire. Today we can buy everything all ready for the pot in a supermarket. There is no more messy work of slaughtering a chicken or scrapping a coconut. Really, much labor had been eliminated.

Of course for the lazy housewife, she does not even have to cook. There are ready-made meals that just have to be heated in a clean labor-saving microwave oven. For the really lazy or busy ones, there are always caterers willing to supply food on a regular basis, though not much can be said for the nutritious values of these meals.

Washing clothes is a cinch nowadays. Just dump the dirty laundry into the washing-machine, add some washing powder and switch the machine on. In a short while, the clothes are washed. Of course some labor is needed to hang the clothes out to dry but it is much less than having to scrub the clothes down by a river.

Labor-Intensive

An ordinary house today has electricity and piped water supplied to it. Some of us do not appreciate how much labor these things save. Someone I know who lives far away from town has to light kerosene lamps every night and fetch water from the well umpteen times a day. That is really labor-intensive. I am thankful I do not have to do such chores.

As the world progresses more, I can safely say that more labor-saving devices and methods will be invented. Perhaps one day we may not have to do anything at all except press a button to get machines to do them for us. What sort of life it would be then? I do not think I want to know.