I once phoned a friend who had recently gone through a separation. He was in a state of deep misery. "Are you missing your wife and kids?" I asked.

"No," he wailed. "I'm missing the domestic helper."

I went round and found him in a dirty apartment trying to use the washing machine. Have you noticed that men can run incredibly complicated machines like nuclear power plants, interplanetary spacecraft and Windows Vista computers but are completely helpless when asked to turn on a washing machine?

"I'm supposed to separate fast colors and non-fast colors," he said. "I didn't even know colors had speeds." Pathetic. I explained to him that "fast colors" probably referred to red things, since sports cars were red.

He plaintively asked: "How does one know whether something is made of cotton?"

"Er, you send it to a materials testing lab and ask them to analyze the fibers," I told him. He replied: "That's what I thought. But it'll take ages."

In the end, we used the male technique of chucking everything in together, pushing all the buttons and cranking every thing to maximum level. (It works for sports cars.) The machine was soon making very loud clunking noises, so we assumed that it was doing its job. (We later discovered that the cause of the racket was the fact that he hadn't emptied the pockets of the clothes being washed. Never mind. It's not as if Blackberrys and i-Phones are expensive, after all.)

Fast forward to the present day. Scene: my apartment. Unlike my friend above, I still have my wife and three kids, plus granny and the dog. But my domestic helper decided to take two weeks off.

"No problem," I said. "Take as long as you like. It'll be good for us to look after ourselves for a while." I'd read that the financial crisis had caused thousands of families world-wide to lose helpers, drivers, amahs, nannies, cooks and servants. So many people are surviving without help.

Day one: We do our own cooking and cleaning. No problem. What’s the fuss about? Day two: Our home continues to function, although it's kind of scary how the laundry basket fills to overflowing every 12 hours. Day four: Clothes pile up faster than they can be washed. Stacks of dirty plates appear on the kitchen counter four times a day. Heaps of junk accumulate on every flat surface by magic.

Day six: Chaos mounts. Doors can no longer be fully opened. The carpet can no longer be seen. We eye the calendar, praying for our helper's return. Day eight: Piles of detritus are now so high that we lose the smallest child for hours at a time. We consider moving to a hotel. Day 10: In a bid to emerge from chaos, all seven of us, including the dog, spend hours washing and cleaning. We use a GPS system to locate the phone and the TV.

Day 11: We get an SMS from our domestic helper telling us that she wants to extend her absence for a third week.

We'll appreciate her when she returns. She can have the washing machine back and I'll go do something simple, such as organizing interplanetary space missions or installing Windows Vista.