Dishing It Out

As modern conveniences go, I think the dishwasher is really the overlooked work-horse/miracle of the latter half of the twentieth century. Sure, washing dishes isn't that difficult or time consuming, but as any siblings that grew up without a dishwashing machine know, there are few occasions that bring boredom and resentment into a toxic half-hour quite like being made to wash and dry the dishes together. It can bring you closer, that quiet time alone in the kitchen to chat and pass the time, or, more likely, foments a bitter contest of wills that will fester into a lifetime spiteful resentment, which usually only ends when one of you moves out. 

My family got a dishwasher when we moved into a house that had one, in 1973. Before this, my parents did not  make my brother and I wash or dry the dishes after dinner, reasoning that it was faster, cheaper and easier on everyone if they did not. But we were all still thrilled to have a dishwasher. I'm pretty sure my mother bought the house for that alone. And dishwashers were not a ubiquitous thing in 1973; our Harvest Gold specimen was still worthy of note at that time. Consumer goods changed quickly in the 70s, and pretty soon dishwashers were standard. 

And I grew up in a house with a dishwasher and took it totally for granted.

The Mister did not grow up in a house with a dishwasher, and our first house when we got married did not have a dishwasher, either. You see where this is going?

The Mister and I didn't live together before we were married, and despite knowing each other for 10 years by the time we tied the knot, and having spent countless hours in each other's company, there were still a few surprises for us when we actually shared the same living space. Like, the fact, that I use about 40 spoons to cook a dinner, and we each use 120 glasses every damn day, and the Mister doesn't actually put anything in the sink, he just likes to arrange the used dishes jauntily around the edge, so that when someone want to use the sink she has to navigate around the obstacles, lest everything go crashing and breaking into said sink. We lived in that house for 4 years, and although I got used to only using 20 spoons to make the dinner, the lack of a dishwasher was always a bone of contention. (Believe me, I tried to figure out a way to put a dishwasher in that kitchen, but it was impossible. The only place to put it was bang in the middle of the room, which  meant jumping over it to get to the bathroom.) 

We had very different ideas of how to deal with the plethora of dishes, particularly baby bottles, that a family generates through the day: I thought that we should wash them as we go, having a drying rack constantly sitting beside the sink, taking up valuable counter space. The Mister would rather keep one of our two sinks with a few inches of water in it all the time, so that you could put things in it "to soak", which meant that, sooner or later, someone was going to have to put their hand into that grey, cold, yucky water to pull the plug out and wash the dishes. It was an ongoing battle, and I can assure you, for two grown people with jobs and morgages and responsible lives, we were shamefully childish about who that someone was going to be. 

The house we live in now came with a dishwasher. I nearly cried with gratitude when we first came though the place. That and the en suite bathroom meant that I didn't care if it came with a roof, we were going to buy this house.

Now the battle about the dishwasher revolves about loading it. The Mister has demonstrated a unique and masterful proficiency in loading the dishwasher; he can fit in approximately 150% more dishes than the rest of us. We think the dishwasher is full and ready to be turned on, and the Mister gets at it and there is an entire empty rack when he is done. I tell you, as Fairly Mild Super Powers go, it's a beauty. 

The problem is (for him, anyway) that now we all know how good he is at it, and we hardly bother any more. The girls and I fling in dishes willy-nilly, secure in the knowledge that the Mister will come along and make everything peachy keen again. The Mister isn't a fan of this system, obviously, but his attempts to teach us how to load the dishwasher have thus far proved fruitless. We simply don't have the talent. (Or, lets be honest, the interest.) 

The Mister likes to run the dishwasher late at night, when the water and electricity rates are cheaper, which means that I wake up in the morning to a dishwasher full of clean dishes (YAY!) that has to be emptied, (BOO!) This is a First World Problem of the first order, because I timed myself once and it took me 10 minutes to empty the dishwasher. Ten whole minutes. (I'm such a whiner...can you imagine explaining to your great-grandmother what a chore it is to put the clean dishes away that you didn't have to clean yourself??She would, rightly, slap you.)

I'm hope that there are siblings and marriages and all kinds of relationships that have been saved by the advent of the dishwasher. I'm pretty sure mine is one of them.