Phantom Visitors

House chores are essentially tragic: no matter how well you rub and scrub, you know that things are bound to get dirty again. That's why cleaning up one's apartment is an ultimate exercise in futility. It's like washing your hair, but with rubber gloves, lots of chemicals and absolutely no sex appeal.

Cleanliness, like happiness, is but a fleeting moment in time and house chores are there to rub it in your face that life is simply not fair.

Some people, however, like their house chores. They say it make them feel centered. They say it make them feel real. They also tend to exhibit serious control issues and serve themselves generous portions of anti-depressives for breakfast.

Wishful thinking

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if you could come home one day after work, open the door of your apartment and find that everything -- literally everything -- has been cleaned up for you?

This is what happened to a 45 year old German from Frankfurt. He came home on Thursday evening to a sparkling clean apartment: the fridge and the bathroom mirror looked as if they had been visited by Mr. Clean himself. A yellow wall in the living room has been painted over in neutral white. There were no signs of breaking and entering and nothing was missing.

So what did the man do? Did he think how fortunate he was? How he, for once, escaped the tiresome routine of quotidian misery?

Not this man. He called the police.

Why on earth?

Some people are very protective of their chores. They don't want you to invade their apartments and do their job for them.

What if you were some sort of bizarre stalker with a penchant for extreme hygiene, somebody who gets a perverse kick out of cleaning up and renovating other people's apartments, a twisted believer in the kindness of strangers?

Luckily, the Frankfurt police weren't born yesterday. They know how to investigate the crime scene, even when the crime in question is visually pleasing. The evidence they found was lying inconspicuously on the living room table: a receipt for the cleaning of a different apartment on the same floor. The workmen had mixed up the apartments and got the wrong set of keys from the landlord.

Everybody could breathe a big sigh of relief knowing that no underground chore army had been involved.