If I were a houseguest and my host had to go to bed during my visit due to illness, and she forgot to ask me to remove the cans of Diet Pepsi that she put in the freezer so they’d cool quickly, and I discovered that one of the cans had exploded in the freezer, what would I do?

I would wish I were a man.

A lot of men would quickly close the freezer door and pretend to have not seen the mess. Or, they would pull out what they needed, close the freezer door, and pretend to have not seen the mess.

Women, however, would do one of two things: Immediately tell the host of the mess or decide to tackle it by themselves. I would be in the latter group, unless the host was standing right next to me, in which case, we’d clean the freezer together.

Yesterday, I was especially fortunate to have had a considerate male houseguest who went the extra mile. He took the exploded can out of the freezer, as well as the others in there. He put them in the sink. He even picked out chunks of frozen cola, thinking he had found them all. He didn’t, but he tried.

His actions were much appreciated. However, he could have let me know this morning about what had happened, instead of letting me discover the disaster later that day, after he left. But, if he had told me about the mess awaiting me, I wouldn’t have appreciated all he had done, and I would have gotten myself worked up about all of the cleaning that was in store for me, so it was actually self-preservative of him to leave me in the dark for a time. For the time it took him to get out of the house.

It all worked out, though. My freezer was overstuffed and desperately needed a cleaning before the explosion. I finally had a non-negotiable reason to empty it. On the plus side, I finally got rid of that uncooked Tofurky from last Christmas.