Make Your Parallels Parallel!

I see this mistake a lot.

https://www.gocomics.com/the-born-loser/2019/07/20

First panel:

He should say “What would you say if I were playing golf instead of cleaning the garage?”

or

What would you say if I played golf instead of cleaned the garage?”

The two parts of his sentence are parallel, so they should have the same verb form.

Of course, in this case he’s wrong no matter what he says…