Saturday, 4 April 2009

Loading the dishwasher

I was very surprised - and a little bit distressed - to find myself talking to someone during the week who doesn't re-load the dishwasher if it hasn't been done properly. He's a regular guy with high professional standards and irreproachable personal morality, but he admits to just pulling the racks out and stuffing his dirty crocks in wherever they will fit. To my mind that is about as bad as picking your socks out of the dirty washing basket, giving them a quick sniff and putting them back on.
Whereas we all know that:
  • mugs must be put in with their handles facing the same way
  • glasses must be put in between the mugs so that no two glasses are adjacent
  • cereal bowls must be arranged in ascending order of size (working from front to back)
  • no two pieces of cutlery of the same size must be put in the same compartment (e.g. not two teaspoons together, although a teaspoon and a dessert spoon will be fine)
  • plates from the same set and with the same pattern must be stacked together (I'll be honest, dear reader, and admit that we use all sorts of odds and ends of crockery - that's all we've got, apart from the posh set that only comes out at Christmas and wouldn't be put in the dishwasher at all - which is why it only comes out at Christmas - although I am comforted to have read somewhere sometime that it is irredeemably bourgeois to have matching crockery, so I consider us let off the hook, style-wise).
Most of this is simple good sense - two teaspoons put together will tend to slot together so that they don't get a proper wash; it is quicker to unload the dishwasher and put the clean crocks away if they are already sorted into sets - and so on.

Which is why, every time I come to the dishwasher and find that it hasn't been stacked properly (which is just about every time I come to the dishwasher), I get everything out onto the side and stack it all back as it should be done.

Come on, there's nothing unhealthily obsessive about it at all. It's only like hanging the washing on the line with the socks in pairs, toes pointing the same way.

What do you mean, you don't do that either?

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