Your garden hose can say a lot about your personality

I just had my garden hose read, and the results are more revealing than a Myers-Briggs personality test.

A friend of ours owns a pool business, so he spends a lot of time interacting with customers and their hoses. As a result, he says, he can tell everything he needs to know about a customer by looking at the hose.

OK, I’ll play, I told him on a recent sunny Sunday.

What does it tell you that my hose is a fashion color, bright blue? I braced myself for a serious dis.

Several things, he said ponderously:

You care about outward appearances.

You like things that get noticed.

And you get bonus points for the hose being new. That tells me, he said, that you are willing to spend money when things need to be replaced rather than hanging onto an old hose that sprays water at the faucet and leaks down your arm when you use it because the copper end is so deformed.

This was going better than expected. But I wanted brutal honesty. What, I asked, does it mean that I leave the hose lying around in the yard?

The answers came rapid fire:

That there are limits to how much you care about appearances.

That organization isn’t important to you.

That you don’t always finish what you start.

On the other hand, he said, the fact that the hose gets moved enough not to leave lines of dead grass in the yard is a good sign. It shows you keep plugging along and don’t abandon things.

Fair enough.

Do I get extra credit, I wanted to know, for having three hoses — one for the back and two for the front, so the kids can wash the dogs while the sprinkler is on?

No. That’s purely a convenience thing, my friend said. But what you paid for the hoses is key, he said.

Around $30 per 50-foot hose.

Good deal, he said. More than 50 cents but less than a dollar per foot is his rule of thumb if you don’t want to hassle with kinks and easily dented couplings.

I was happy with his mostly favorable reading but wanted to know more. What things earn serious black marks when it comes to hose condition?

Duct tape repairs.

Water spraying onto the house at the faucet during use.

And the worst:

A hose with the end piece cut off so you can’t use attachments.

None of those applies to me. So even though my yard looks like an abandoned lot in places, I’m hoping a lot of passers-by will appreciate the story my hoses have to tell.