A Raccoon on Meth

Unlike me, Rachel is very tidy and organised in most areas of her life (apart from the car, which she treats like a mobile landfill, and the freezer, which I wrote about here). I am messy and disorganised in almost all areas of my life. I am writing this at a desk piled high with books, scraps of paper and other assorted items that I can’t be bothered to find a home for. The floor beside my bed is littered with clothes like it was when I was 15.

I save all of my tidiness and organisational skills for the only place it really matters.

The dishwasher.

Because I know that the dishwasher needs tidiness and order - a little care and attention - otherwise it is unable to achieve its only purpose in life.

In every partnership, there is a person who stacks the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and a person who stacks the dishwasher like a racoon on meth.

Tweet by @ColeyTangerina

Comparing Rachel’s dishwasher loading skills to a raccoon on meth would be very unfair and insulting. To the raccoon. If I had to choose between trusting Rachel to stack our dishwasher or a raccoon on meth, I would choose the raccoon every time.

Rachel will happily take a dirty ladle or slotted spoon and stick it straight into the cutlery basket so that it protrudes and prevents the spray arm from spinning. She will also willingly poke items through both the top and bottom racks and let them dangle and obstruct these spray arms.

She will put bowls, mugs and glasses face up, so that in the morning, they will be sitting there, full to the brim of dirty water, which then gets slopped all over the clean items below when I pull the top rack out.

She will happily line up bowls snugly against plates, both squashed into the same slot, creating a perfect seal around the bowl to ensure that not a drop of water can get inside to clean it.

It is like she deliberately tries to think of the most ineffective way of loading the dishwasher, and then chooses that way.

I will sometimes get home and find the dishwasher running in the middle of the day.

‘It was full,’ says Rachel when I ask her why.

‘Really? But it's only been you in the house. And it's only 10 a.m.’

‘Yeah, well it's definitely full.’

I’ll open it when it’s finished to find just two plates and one bowl in the bottom rack. One diagonally across half the rack, the other diagonally across the other half, and a bowl taking up the remainder. It is quite a skill to be that bad.

If Rachel lived on her own, or even if it was just the two of us in our house, this would not matter too much to me and I would not be so finicky. But we are a family of five who get through a lot of crockery and cutlery in a day. Every inch of space in the dishwasher is needed. If we adopted Rachel’s tactic, it would be full before we had even finished our breakfast.

I don’t claim to be the Scandinavian architect alluded to in the tweet above. I am more of a reliable and conscientious builder. You can trust that I will get the job done in an orderly and efficient manner, and that I will load that dishwasher how it was designed to be loaded.

I do have my faults. I can often be guilty of overfilling the dishwasher, of somehow managing to find a space for every remaining item. I am usually the last to bed, so after correcting all of Rachel’s mistakes, I then try to squeeze in all of the other glasses and plates that I have carried through from the lounge. I know that some of them will not get cleaned properly. But it’s late and I’m tired and I'm lazy. And I would rather clean a half-dirty plate in the morning, than a full dirty one late at night. Or I sometimes just leave those few dirty items in the dishwasher to go again the next night.

I enjoyed reading this story from a few years ago.

A woman goes to see her therapist and admits she’s finding everything very difficult.

The therapist asks what she is struggling with.

‘I dunno, man. Life,’ she says.

The therapist is not satisfied so asks what exactly she is worried about.

She admits that she’s annoyed with her dishwasher. It sucks and she ends up having to scrub the plates clean.

The therapist comes up with the simple solution.

‘Run the dishwasher twice.’

He goes on to say, ‘Run it three times, who cares?! Rules do not exist.’

This advice is not really about dishwashers, but more a metaphor for learning to embrace the freedom of doing whatever it takes to try and make life a little easier.

Unfortunately, this ideology has some flaws.

It doesn’t matter how many times you run a dishwasher with face up bowls, and ladles in the cutlery rack, you are not going to end up with clean dishes.

Countless times, I have tried to politely point out to Rachel that the way she has put things in will not only stop them from being cleaned but will prevent everything else in the dishwasher being cleaned, too. She acknowledges my suggestion and then steadfastly refuses to believe that there is a wrong way to stack a dishwasher. There is. And she manages to find it every single time.

According to a study, loading the dishwasher is one of the top reasons why couples argue.

Rachel and I no longer fight about the dishwasher. It has gone beyond cause for argument in our house. We have been married nearly 20 years and had a dishwasher for ten of those, so we have learned to live with each other’s dishwasher foibles - Rachel’s being her lack of any dishwasher common sense, and mine being that I’m a stickler for wanting things to come out clean.

It is like she has now given up on it completely - which is totally fine by me, by the way - but rather than leave things on the side for me to stack, she still insists on throwing stuff haphazardly into the dishwasher, knowing full well I will be restacking it later.

Our children have inherited different dishwasher character traits from Rachel and me. Layla seems to have the most common sense (because that’s all good dishwasher stacking involves) and has spent lots of time observing me. She can now be totally trusted (well, 90%) to put things in the correct place. Kitty is very much like Rachel. She knows she has to help clear up after meals, so will put in a token effort, but will stack it as if she has been blindfolded.

And as for Leo. I’m still not sure he knows where the dishwasher is, or what it does. He believes in the dishwasher fairy.

My mum was bemoaning my dad the other day for still believing in the dishwasher fairy. He leaves things near the dishwasher and then expects them to get magically loaded into it later. I could not understand my mum's irritation. This sounds like a dream scenario to me. She doesn’t know how lucky she is. I would much rather these raccoon-on-meth types just left the dishwasher stacking to us architects, rather than causing us even more work by forcing us to repair the damage from their half-arsed attempts.

I believe it is healthy to have both Scandinavian architects and raccoons on meth living together. Imagine two architects loading the dishwasher together. It is unlikely to end well.

When my brother-in-law Eric comes to stay, I happily bow down to his superior dishwasher stacking skills. He is a master. He is the true architect. He insists on segregating the cutlery into knives, forks and spoons when it is loaded. This does make the unloading process smoother but is not something I do as it increases the risk of spoons nestling inside each other (spooning, I suppose) and not being cleaned properly. But thanks to Eric’s attention to detail, he ensures this doesn't happen. The whole process does take him about an hour, though, but it's pretty faultless.

Imagine two raccoons on meth living and stacking together? Well, you might as well throw the dishes into the washing machine.

Across the world, Scandinavian architects and raccoons on meth somehow coexist in domestic harmony. Like the therapist's sage advice to run the dishwasher twice, we should remember that rules are meant to be challenged, and it is our contrasting views and methods, this beautiful chaos, that keeps life interesting.

So, as the age-old question echoes around kitchens everywhere… Scandinavian architect or raccoon on meth - which one are you?