Rant of the Week: I Hate My Dishwasher

There aren't many appliances that I have fewer problems with than my dishwasher. I guess I'm lucky, but I happen to like mine, at least more than Jay Rayner at the The Guardian likes his. Ladies and gentlemen, an excerpt from the rant of the week:

At dinner parties, which of course is where these things are discussed, guests who had offered to help clear up find themselves standing in the middle of my kitchen, paralysed with fear when they realise helping means "washing up". Then they do the sidehead sympathy thing at my wife, who pulls her "see how I suffer" face. I really don't care. For here is the undiscussed truth. Dishwashers are where your vital kitchen stuff goes to hide. Whenever I've used one — in a holiday let, for example — I have discovered that anything I want is in the dishwasher, dirty, because it wasn't turned on.

I get Rayner's general thrust: Dishwashers can be annoying, rob parents of convenient character-building exercises for their children, and can "promise so much and deliver so little," he says. But, frankly, he seems to be missing the point. The 1880s socialite Josephine Cochran invented the dishwasher because she didn't want to deal with washing the dishes or with her servants breaking her ancestral 17th-century china, according to the University of Houston's College of Engineering. The dishwasher doesn't exist to help your kids avoid chores or for your wife's role in the household to be that much easier. It exists because it's fking easier to keep plates clean when you don't have to scrub each and every single one.

There's a reason dishwashers have been a thing for the last 120 years. There's a reason Jack Donaghy had a clear-dishwasher epiphany in the final episode of 30 Rock. There's a reason you can cook with one. And (as ridiculous as they are) there's a reason "dishwasher-safe" iPad stands are available. There's a reason booting guests from your home by loading the dishwasher is a viable option. They're useful. Deal with it.

[Via The Guardian]

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