LOWER NETHERBY —
A Lower Netherby man has cleaned his bedroom for the first time since spring, sources confirmed Tuesday, after realising his passport was “somewhere in here” and his flight was leaving on Thursday.
Darren Pocklington, 31, began the search at approximately 9:40pm by lifting a single jumper off the chair, a move he later described as “optimistic.” By 11pm he had excavated the chair itself, which he had not seen since March, and a gym membership card he has been paying for since the previous financial year.
Pocklington told reporters he had “always known there was a floor,” standing on a patch of carpet several shades lighter than the rest. “I don’t really have a reason to go looking for anything,” he added.
“I always knew there was a floor. I just didn’t have a reason to go looking for it.”
The operation uncovered two mugs of what archaeologists are calling “historical significance,” a charger that fits no phone Pocklington has ever owned, a birthday card from his gran urging him to “do something with yourself,” and a grey hoodie from 2014, bought during a period he describes as “when I still had plans.”
“I accused my brother of taking that hoodie,” Pocklington said. “I owe him an apology. One of us will be dead before I give it, but I owe it.”
The passport was eventually located at 1:15am inside a coat pocket, where it had been placed specifically “so I wouldn’t lose it.” It expires in four months. The airline has confirmed this is a problem and that the fare is non-refundable.
According to the Netherby Institute of Domestic Avoidance, a body funded entirely by a cleaning-products company that declined to be named, 78% of adults clean thoroughly under only three conditions: guests arriving, moving out, or losing a document the state requires before it lets them leave. A further 15% clean only when a landlord announces an inspection, typically with four hours’ notice and the deposit already spent.
Dr. Helen Marsh, who studies procrastination but has not yet published, called the behaviour “completely normal and completely pointless.” “Everyone’s room gets cleaned eventually,” she said. “Sometimes it’s you. More often it’s a house-clearance firm, charging by the skip.”
At press time, Pocklington had declared the room “basically done” and resumed piling clothes on the chair at a rate of one jumper per day, a pace experts say will bury the chair again by mid-November.
This article is satire. The people, places, quotes and studies described are fictional.