The dishwasher. It’s a nice appliance, one that I didn’t have growing up as we, the children, were the dishwashers some of the time, or Mom was the rest of the time. We also didn’t do the “drying the dishes after washing them’ thing as we had the lovely rack for the other half of the sink, the one where you can pile the dishes about three feet high to dry, and then, as a kid, instead of putting the dishes away, would fish out the bowl from the bottom of the pile for a bowl of cereal even if there was a clean one in the cupboard. I was, however, always fascinated by the clear dishwasher they would have in the appliance section at Sears, and always wanted to just stop and watch it for a while, but my parents would never let me.
It wasn’t until my fraternity days in college that I first had a dishwasher, but even then it was an industrial machine, made of stainless steel with a heater that didn’t really work right, and then, finally, at my first apartment, there it was, a normal dishwasher!
The thing was, since I lived by myself, at first I didn’t use it that much, still relying on the old “rack in the sink” thing for the longest time, until, really, I ended up in my townhouse and realized you could just keep putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and then maybe once or twice a week have to turn it on. Getting married, though, the “leaving the dirty dishes until full” thing stopped, and I also came to realize that there are two kinds of dishwasher people: The “load the dishwasher appropriately” people, and the “load the dishwasher all willy-nilly” kind. I will say that I am the latter, and will venture to say that my wife (and she may not agree) is the “willy-nilly” kind.
With that, though, I will fully admit that I’m a dishwasher re-arranger. I don’t know if it’s my engineering background, I don’t know if it’s because I like to solve puzzles, or I don’t know if it’s because I figure someone designed those plate holders a certain way for maximum cleaning efficiency that we should load the dishwasher a certain way, but rarely a day goes by when I don’t move at least one plate/bowl/glass that my wife puts in the dishwasher and put it someplace else that I feel is more appropriate for plate/bowl/glass cleanliness. If the dishwasher is getting full, and it looks like that bowl won’t fit, I’m in there moving a glass from here to there, shifting a plate to the other side, and somehow doing my best to make it all fit. My wife will put a baking dish in one way – I’ll move it. She’ll put a glass on one side of the rack – I’ll move it to the other side. I’ll fill the dishwasher properly, and she, well, I love her. I know my re-arranging drives her crazy sometimes, but I can’t help it, re-arranging the dishwasher, I fear, will always be a part of me.
It was in one of my last dishwasher re-arranging episodes that I wondered a lot about this, and so I plight: Are you a dishwasher re-arranger?
That’s it for this plight! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!