My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Dishing Dirt

“It is not necessary to rinse dishes before putting them into the dishwasher.” This is line one, page five of our dishwasher’s instruction manual. I recited these words to my husband, Ed, last week, so he would understand that it is not just me that holds this opinion, it is also the authors of the Frigidaire Dishwasher Use and Care Manual, and if anyone should have the last word on rinsing, it is these fine people.

And Ed doesn’t merely rinse the dishes before putting them in. He all-out washes them—thereby defeating the machine’s purpose. If I’d known I could get my husband to wash dishes for me, I wouldn’t have insisted we buy a dishwasher. This is a device that washes dishes so that people don’t have to, so they have time to go off and pursue their dreams, so they can write the Great American Novel, or the great American Dishwasher Use and Care Manual or whatever it is they dream of writing.

I believe prewashing is demeaning to the dishwasher. If people wash the dishes first, the dishwasher is reduced to a sort of unneeded front-loading autoclave. Imagine the scorn of the other large appliances.

REFRIGERATOR: “So, what do you do around here?”

DISHWASHER: “I make perfectly clean dishes scalding hot for a while.”

REFRIGERATOR: “Why on earth would you do that?”

DISHWASHER: “No reason. Utterly pointless. I’m so depressed.”

Ed says he rinses the dishes before putting them in because if you don’t, they dry out while you wait for a full load to accrue, and then little bits of cereal and egg fuse to the surfaces. True enough. So you don’t put the dishes in until you’ve got a full load; you leave them stacked in the sink with water in them. I acknowledge that there are drawbacks to this method, such as the floating communities of mold and decomposing lunch matter and such that show up after a day or so.

I picked up the Use and Care Manual. Page 10: “Should mold appear on soaking dishes, stop looking in the sink.” Ed grabbed the manual from me. Page 16: “If your wife thinks leaving dirty dishes in the sink for days on end is acceptable adult behavior, call our toll-free number and have her committed at absolutely no cost to you.”

Ed also believes that the dishwasher is for washing dishes, not pots and pans. He pointed out the drawing in the manual of a properly loaded top rack. In the drawing, the area where I typically wedge frying pans and macaroni dishes is filled with neat rows of dessert plates, cups and saucers. In other words, the entire top half of your dishwasher is reserved for those evenings when the Queen of Norway and her entourage drop in for dinner. Outside of the mold community, we don’t get many visitors. Or not the saucer type, anyway. At our house, coffee goes in mugs, and dessert is eaten out of the carton or, in the case of cookies, held in the hand. If the Queen of Norway makes a stink, you serve her her Nutter Butters on a paper towel.

There will be no saucers in my top rack. If I’m going to have a machine help with the dishwashing, I’m going to give the machine all the disgusting, greasy things, and I’ll handle the saucers.

Ed and I have reached a compromise, though Ed isn’t aware of it yet. Here’s how it works. When Ed finds glasses and cereal bowls in the sink, he can go ahead and prewash them and put them in the top rack of the dishwasher. Then, when I need that space for the lasagna pan, I remove the glasses and bowls and put them back in the cupboard. So basically, I have two dishwashers. The Queen of Norway couldn’t have it much better.