Tasks for Dobby the House-Elf
Dobby the house-elfWhat would you do if you had a house-elf (as in from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels)?
I recently fantasized about what I would have Dobby do, if he served my family:
- Clean the kitchen after each meal
- Help with Spring and Fall cleanings
- Stay on top the Year-Round Maintenance Chart of home maintenance tasks
- Package the Christmas gifts and get them shipped so they arrive by Christmas day
- Get us great seats at the ballet (I guess he’d have to have access to our gold for that, hmm)
- Find the best flight or other transportation to Sedona for Thanksgiving, and stay on top of deals that we could take advantage of
- Pick up library books as they come in and return the ones we’re done with
- Fill the gas tank and keep the car clean inside and out
- Take the car to the repair shop and pick it up when it’s ready
- Do the laundry and, especially, put away the clean clothes, towels, sheets, etc.
- Change the bedclothes every couple of weeks and keep the linen closet tidy and organized (with the linen folded per the Marie Kondo method)
- Help me sort and purge file folders, and use his magic to rearrange the heavy furniture in my office
- Magically organize all my folders and distribute them evenly among my filing cabinets (per David Allen’s recommendation)
- Magically sense the folders I haven’t touched in over a year so I can purge them
- Magically transport archive stuff neatly to the attic
- Flush and clean my fountain pens when they run out of ink
- Keep the Dremel (for the dogs’s toenails) in good working order
- Keep the cobwebs away in the garage and at the front entrance
- Replace blown light bulbs as soon as they go out
- Keep the gutters clean
- Organize the arborist to come every year and take care of our trees
- Keep our shoes clean, in good repair, and polished
- Package and sell eBay stuff that no longer serves me
Plenty of work to keep Dobby happy!
What would you have a house-elf do? Would you have a Winky, a Dobby, a Kreacher?