The dishwasher was, by household convention, the Respondent's responsibility. Loading was shared. Unloading was the Respondent's, on grounds long forgotten, possibly relating to a chore-redistribution session in the spring of 2020 that no party in the present matter could reconstruct from memory. The arrangement had functioned, by the Client's reckoning, for approximately eighteen months. By April of 2022 it was no longer functioning.
The pattern, the Client testified, was as follows. After dinner, she would audit the dishwasher's status. If it had run overnight and was full of clean dishes, she would ask the Respondent to unload it before bed. The Respondent, almost without fail, would either fail to acknowledge the request or, if pressed, claim not to have heard it.
The Client had attempted, prior to the consultation, a series of escalating workarounds. A written reminder taped to the dishwasher's front had been observed but ignored. A digital reminder set on the Respondent's phone had been dismissed within seconds of its activation. A direct standing-in-the-doorway-of-the-kitchen verbal request had produced acknowledgment on one occasion and, on the next, a counter-claim that the request was "kind of annoying, actually." The Client noted, with what the Journal read as genuine fatigue, that she had not initially understood the original chore allocation to require a sustained enforcement architecture. The Respondent's evolving inattention had required one.
The Selective-Hearing Defense
"I didn't hear you" is, the Journal observes, among the most resilient affirmative defenses in the household repertoire. It cannot be definitively rebutted. It cannot be conclusively proven. It does not require the Respondent to defend the merits of her conduct; she merely denies that the conduct, properly speaking, was conduct at all. Absent acoustic monitoring of the household, the Client cannot establish, by any standard of proof familiar to the Journal, that the Respondent in fact heard the request.
The Respondent, in pleading the defense, leaned heavily on the empirical fact that the dishwasher operates from across the kitchen, that the Respondent during the relevant intervals was wearing earbuds, that the earbuds were producing audio of considerable volume, and that the Client, when she made the relevant requests, did so at her customary speaking voice rather than at a register designed to penetrate active acoustic isolation. By the Respondent's reading, no reasonable person could have heard the request. She had not heard it. She had not, therefore, ignored it. She had not, by extension, breached the household covenant.
A Question of Inferred Receipt
We were asked to opine on the doctrine of inferred receipt — whether, in the case of a request made by speech in an audibly compromised acoustic environment, the speaker's reasonable expectation of receipt can substitute for actual receipt. The doctrine has its uses in commercial settings: a letter mailed to a known address is presumed received, even if the recipient denies it. But the doctrine assumes a stable channel. The household speech channel between Client and Respondent was, the Journal had to acknowledge, anything but stable.
The Client suggested, in pre-trial discussions, that she could solve the channel problem by physically tapping the Respondent on the shoulder before delivering each request. The Journal allowed that this would, indeed, defeat the selective-hearing defense. The Client found the prospect exhausting. She had not, she said, signed up to be a runner of physical-tap-summonses in her own kitchen. The Journal sympathized.
Disposition
The matter was resolved by the imposition of a household rule that the Journal will describe, for the record, as crude but effective. Any request from the Client to the Respondent that was not acknowledged within ten seconds would result in the Respondent's phone being placed on the kitchen counter, with the charging cable detached, until the underlying task was performed. The rule was implemented unilaterally and without consultation. Within seventy-two hours, the Respondent had begun acknowledging requests with what the Client described as "an alert, almost cheerful, 'okay.'" The selective-hearing defense was, the Journal is pleased to report, retired from the household repertoire. The dishwasher has, since the rule's introduction, been unloaded with what passes — by adolescent standards — for promptness. The Journal will note, with what we hope is appropriate modesty, that the rule's drafting was the Client's; the Journal merely observed, in passing, that escalating disengagement tends to call for escalating engagement, and that the most efficient form of the latter is the one the Respondent is most likely to notice.