Dishwashers

A dishwasher should be a wonderful tool, a magical time saving gadget that you put your dirty dishes in and, a time later, they emerge, clean and shining brightly. Gleaming like they do in the adverts for dishwasher tablets. It should be one of the greatest inventions ever to appear in our kitchens. It should be improving dozens of relationships around the world as arguments about who has to do the dishes are removed from your life.

Alas, it is not so. A gadget with such magical promise is compromised almost beyond all usefulness.

The first major lie is that you don't have to wash up by hand any more. This is the biggest lie of all! We have a dishwasher, but after almost every meal we have to wash stuff by hand. Ironically the biggest culprit here is non-stick pans. Another invention that's supposed to be a boon to the lazy but even on the rare occasions when non-stick pans say they are dishwasher safe you find that they get discoloured and damaged in dishwashers. You can't put wooden stuff in, the dishwasher will blast the logos off mugs and glasses, it'll damage any valuable china you might have. In all probably about half the stuff you regularly use can't be put in the dishwasher!

Still, you can simply put the remaining half of your dirty dishes in the dishwasher and they just come out clean, right? Oh, how wonderful that would be! No, in reality you have to piss around for ages trying to fit your perfectly normally shaped dishes into it. Have dishwasher manufacturers never seen a bowl? Maybe I am a bit of a freak because I regularly use them. I guess I should explain in case Mr Hotpoint is reading. A bowl is like a plate, but it has a deeper impression in the middle which stops liquids from slopping over the edge. I find that they are good for eating soup or breakfast cereal out of. Sometimes I even use them to keep things in in the fridge. I can't easily put them in the dishwasher though. There's no suitable space. How dare I have something wider than a plate that I want to fit in there. Don't even think about trying to put something plastic and lightweight in there. It'll get blasted around the dishwasher and block your nozzles within seconds. Even if you don't have anything inconvenientlty shaped you still can't fit your stuff in unless you have a number of cups and plates (no bowls) that corresponds exactly to what the dishwasher manufacturer designed the dishwasher for. You've had a few people round for drinks and only have 2 dirty plates but 40 dirty glasses to wash? Unlucky.

Once you've finally managed to fight your stuff into the dishwasher, having scraped it so much you could practically have washed it yourself already, you find that it doesn't even clean it. The fact that you've freakishly used a bowl to eat your breakfast out of and wanted to wash a chopping board means you've blocked one of the nozzles somewhere and half your mugs are still dirty.

And after all that, you still have do unload the damn thing, and if you can't be bothered, you get the dirty washing stacked up until someone can be bothered. It's not just dishwashers that suffer from this kind of problem. You look at these newfangled robots that hoover your floor and mow your lawn and you find they have similar flaws. Sure, they can mow your lawn, as long as it's perfectly flat and the grass isn't too long. They can hoover your house, but they can't go up and down stairs and they can't lift the sofa up to hoover under there (not that I'd do that either).

Despite all this, I still can't believe that the people who used own the house I'm buying put in a kitchen a couple of years ago and didn't put in a dishwasher! The fools! Didn't they think about all the extra washing up my girlfriend is going to have to do?