the coldest profession

A commonplace of folk psychology is that very often we feel considerable amounts of dread about something that we have to do, perhaps even to the point where we put it off as long as we can, but then we actually force ourselves to do the thing we find that it wasn't nearly as bad as we had thought. Despite this wisdom, and even though I procrastinated mightly about leaving my office this evening, I still found when I got to the car that scraping the snow and ice off my windows was every bit as unpleasant as I had dreaded it would be, and then some.