A modest proposal

At the Y on Saturday, Graham was playing in a play area (and rightly so) while I observed. Two moms were hanging out waiting for their kids, having a conversation which was entirely generic and familiar to me, from "I don't have anything at all to wear" to "I can't get one thing done all day. There's no time." And it occurred to me that, if suburban plaints and arguments ("Dinner is at 5:30! You can't bring them home at 6 and expect to get them in bed by 7:30! Are you crazy?") are entirely generic, there's really no reason why one need argue with one's own spouse.

The entire function could be randomly outsourced to someone else's spouse. So, say you're calling home at 6:45 to say you're going to be home late. If you punch a code into the phone, designating the genre of call you're about to make, you should be able to have it routed to someone else's wife with similarly aged kids, with whom you could have the same argument you would've had with your own. Your spouse, of course, would go onto the list to be a next routee. She could argue with them freely and furiously, saying whatever she felt like, knowing that her specific words would not come home to haunt her later. Another triumph for modern technology!