HALIFAX – Local veterinary technician Brian Chambers, 27, has reportedly cleaned a small fraction of his one bedroom apartment in advance of a Skype call with his parents, in hopes of creating the illusion of a reasonably orderly living space.
“I figure the space behind the couch, and maybe the window will be enough” explained Chambers, outlining the tidying measures he hopes will deceive his loving parents. If successful, Chambers hopes his parents will be fooled by the images of relative neatness, never suspecting that their son currently lives in a fetid pile of pizza boxes, soiled laundry, and carpets that were last vacuumed by the unit’s previous tenant.
While removing a water damaged poster from the wall detailing various models of bongs, Chambers outlined the lengths he must now go to while preparing to Skype with his parents, Nancy and Trevor. “It used to be we could talk on the phone and I wouldn’t have to clean up anything,” Chambers lamented, while scraping the remaining poster glue from the wall. Sources report that upon purchasing an iPad at a local Best Buy, the Chambers family’s semi-regular phone conversations have now been replaced by regular and visually unforgiving video chat sessions.
While conceding that the area he picks up shrinks smaller with each passing Skype call, Chambers remains confident that his minimal cleaning efforts will fool his parents into believing that his is a functional adult capable of maintaining a reasonable standard of self-sufficiency.
“I mean, the couch still smells like beer. But that won’t matter on Skype,” noted Chambers, discovering yet another so-called “lifehack” which will allow his carefully-cropped illusion to sustain itself, while at the same time requiring him to change absolutely nothing about his living, eating, or bathing habits.
In spite of his efforts to stage a workable backdrop of hygiene, Chambers revealed that he had also planned supplementary lies, should his charade come under scrutiny. “I mean, if they ask me to move the laptop camera around to see the place, I guess I could say it’s plugged in,” mused the modern day illusionist, before changing out of his sriracha-stained “DTF” shirt.
At press time, Chambers’ parents were still trying to figure out how to turn on the camera on their iPad mini.
