Dishwasher Wars

I just stumbled across this blog post on the Guardian website. It describes the running battle this blogger has with his partner "The Baker" in the kitchen and especially over the dishwasher. I'm sure "The Baker" is some kind of hitman, possibly an Italian American version of Bunman.

Back in the early days of Lazyview (nearly a year ago!) I mentioned my own struggles with the dishwasher. Anonymous commenter said they had a meticulously stacked dishwasher. I was fairly shocked. It has stuck in my mind all this time and I'm reminded of it whenever I see a dishwasher and this article brought it all back. Now we have someone else claiming that they painstakingly rinse their plates and carefully organise the dishwasher. What's the point? If you've gone to all that trouble you might as well just have hand washed the dishes in the first place WHICH IS WHAT I HAVE TO DO NOW BECAUSE I HAVE NO DISHWASHER SO SHUT UP COMPLAINING YOU STUPID GUARDIAN BLOGGER OR THE BAKER WILL BAKE YOU INTO A PIE!

Mmm pie.

Incidently, I read somewhere that dishwashers have dirt sensors, and if the dishes are all basically clean they turn down the cleaning power.

New Deal for Washing Up

So, the new house has no dishwasher and my laziness when it comes to washing dishes is a well acknowledged fact between myself and my girlfriend. In order to prevent her getting so annoyed with having to do all the washing up that she actually explodes I susggested we should work out an arrangement in advance. Otherwise I'd just weedle out of doing the washing up all the time.

A short debate later we decided that she hates drying up, but doesn't mind washing, I'm the other way round so every night after dinner we'd do all the washing up and she'd wash up and I'd dry. Fine. We're just about a week into the new house, new deal and it's apparent that this system is even more brilliant than I could have anticpated. The first thing I hadn't thought of is that I only need to dry stuff that won't fit in the drying rack. Once we get the washing up down to a level where the rest will fit in, I can stop, it gets better though. I've also discovered that on quite a lot of days, there's not even enough stuff that needs washing to fill the drying rack. So I don't have to do anything! The down side is that I suspect that the division of labour is so unfair that the New Deal will come under review fairly shortly. Probably as soon as she reads this blog. D'oh!

Actually, considering all the non dishwasher safe stuff we have and the general crapness of our old dishwasher we're not missing it at all and we're saving the world by using less energy. On the downside, even if we had one we could no longer theoretically poach a large whole salmon in a dishwasher, anyone got a large fish kettle?

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?