“When making love, try to avoid shrieking.”
Is this a reasonable sentence to put in an employee manual for farm workers who also stay in our home?
My wife and I didn’t think so.
Then a young couple moved into the downstairs suite.
Our home office is above the suite.
At night, but sometimes during their lunch breaks, they did something that very much sounded like lovemaking. He howled, she shrieked or she howled and he shrieked.
(I could go into more detail, but this is not that kind of publication. At Small Farm Canada, we just talk about safe things. Like hatching eggs.)
It was distracting to work at the home office while horizontal gymnastics went on below.
I was on the phone with another farmer. “What’s that sound in the background?” he said. “New workers,” I explained. “They are washing a farm truck, having fun.”
“I’ll say!” he said. “I think I’ll wash my truck too!”
We never did confront that couple about the noises, but we amended our employee manual, in which we try, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to eliminate and limit those behaviours which have a deleterious effect on our lives.
We’ve had the manual for some years. It primarily covers farm work, but it includes expectations for staying with us. It is a work in progress. As time passes, some things are added, a few are deleted. No one uses a landline phone anymore, everyone has a cell phone. So we took out the section about spending too much time on the home phone. On the other hand, it seems like everyone smokes pot, so we added a section confining smoking to a place where it won’t eddy up and into our part of the house.
Our manual is based on a version developed by a smart, progressive farming couple, though when they handed it over it was with an unhearty endorsement. “It doesn’t work,” they said. “You can’t possibly think of all the things that can go wrong.”
At the end of the growing season one year, they returned from a day at a farmers’ market to find their fields covered in tents. A worker had gone to a music festival and decided it would be fun to ask everyone back to the farm.
“What made you think it was okay to ask everyone at a music festival back to our farm?” they asked. To which the worker replied, “You didn’t say anything about it not being okay in the employee manual.”
That’s the trouble with attempting to limit, or control, behaviour. It just creates zones of prescribed conduct, suggesting that anything not laid out in those zones is okay.
We made it clear to another couple staying with us one summer that, because the electrical panel for the house was in the suite, we may have to access it when they were not there. One day, when my wife was alone, the chest freezer stopped working. After ruling out the plug she went to investigate the circuit breaker. She knocked and confirmed no one was in the suite and entered.
It was dark. Something moved. She turned on a light.
Snakes.
Corn snakes. Slithering, sliding, shiny snakes.
When my wife finally calmed down, a month later, we crafted a new entry in the employee manual: “If staying in the home suite, no pets or animals, including bugs or reptiles of any sort are to be brought in without first talking to the homeowners.”
Some behaviours are easier to prescribe than others. You can tell someone not to park in front of the barn door, or not to barbecue on dry grass, or to put out their own recycling. You can’t ask people to be, well, normal.
A couple staying with us were good enough workers but they lacked qualities that seem to me as elemental as breathing. When we met them coming and going, as happened multiple times each day, they didn’t say hi, hello, good day or how are you. Nothing. Not a wave or nod. I may as well have been walking down Yonge Street, hundreds of unacknowledging faces passing every minute.
I asked them if there was a problem, had we upset them?
No, all was fine, they said.
Their behaviour made life awkward for living in our own home, and which was so basically bad that it was hard to address. I mean, do we have to write in the manual: “Smile, be civil”?
It’s enough to make a fellow want to scream. Or howl.
— Tom Henry