Work worth avoiding.

Cleaning is still the work that most people say they would like to avoid doing. They dislike cleaning floors, windows, toilets, kitchens, bathrooms, walls, showers, cars, desks, even computers. Strangely, no one mentioned cleaning themselves or their kids--no one even mentioned washing their hands or brushing their teeth. (We didn't ask kids.) More surprising yet, only one of our hundred respondents to this question mentioned washing clothes (and the part that she actually doesn't like is folding them).

So it would seem that the industry has solved most of the horrors associated with laundry and actually converted what was once the most odious of chores into something that no one seeks to avoid. Kudos to great appliances and great laundry products and a century of soap operas!

Thanks to Swiffer and other great products and great marketing from Proctor & Gamble and its competitors, dusting is no longer a horror, but floors remain a challenge. Many consumers still detest vacuuming and even "Swiffering." In spite of Windex, they aren't happy about windows either.

Since our open-ended question asked about the work they'd most like to avoid doing and didn't differentiate between paying and no-paying jobs, some of our respondents answered with "jobs" like factory work, police work, or office work. The most citations of this type were "meter maids." The sobering message here is that very few of us want to be scorned and avoided by others.

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Happy Spring!