It seems like every interest group wants its own Bill of Rights these days — Airline passengers, Cruise Passengers, Online Privacy Advocates. A Postpartum Depression Bill of Rights was just proposed last week.
All worthy causes, I’m sure. But there’s another group just as deserving of a bill of rights — a group that suffers indignities at least as humiliating and outrageous as stranded airline passengers. So I’ve taken up the flag to petition for a bill of rights that I think is long overdue.
THE MENOPAUSE BILL OF RIGHTS
- Establish procedures to respond to all partner complaints within 24 seconds and with appropriate resolution within 2 hours.
- Notify partner within ten minutes of diversions, delays and cancellations. Is it really too much to ask you to pick up the damn phone?
- Provide for the essential needs of menopausal partner including chocolate, wine, foot rubs, ice packs, tweezers, magnifying glasses, gallon jugs of personal lube, Ambien, Valium, working aphrodisiacs, hair dye, Spanx and access to a decent shopping.
- Provide for the needs of menopausal partners by establishing procedures for assisting with maintaining the pretense eternal youth and the feeding of unrealistic expectations at all times. This includes detaining Michelle Pfeiffer and slapping her until she confesses who she sold her soul to.
- Publish, update and complete monthly a comprehensive list of chores, “honey-dos” and other household repairs and enhancements, including those that have been chronically delayed twenty-five years or more.
- Compensate “bummed” women or women fed up with “this whole fucking aging thing” by refund of 150% of children’s college tuition.
- Formal implementation of a Satisfaction Review Committee, made up actual consumers of pills that supposedly “revitalize your sex life,” diets that “let you eat whatever you want” and exercise equipment that “only takes four minutes a day” — which would have the legal authority to review, investigate, draw and quarter the manufacturers.
- Make information about children’s sports and band schedules, orthodontist appointments, cancellations and frequent “ride to the mall” program requirements available in an easily accessed location, updated in real-time and administrated by a transit authority herein known as “somebody else.”
- Ensure that “excess baggage” be handled with extreme caution; Refrain from notifications of baggage status even explicitly asked if “these pants make me look fat.” Neglect of this provision requires compensation equal to current market value of a week at a spa.
- Require that these rights be posted in a prominent, central location because… um… because, um, what was I saying?
