The Art of Dishwashing
Millions of people wash dishes everyday and we think nothing of it. Some do it for a paycheck and others do it for a chore. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all washed the dishes at some point in our lives, and few have ever really liked it. In fact, simply saying the phrase “wash the dishes” is enough to bring a chill down anyone’s spine. And yet for all our distaste, dishwashing can be as much an art as it is a punishment. Let me explain.
I’ve been a dishwasher for a long time, both in the house and in the workforce. Getting paid to wash dishes doesn’t make the job any more tolerable, I’ll tell you that. Not when you’re soaked up to the waist in soapwater and your fingers are so pruned it takes them seven days to get back to normal. I worked at a pizza place where the sink didn’t always work, and the pipes were known to flood. The silver trays used to roll the dough weren’t so bad, but the deep-dish pizza pans were the worst. If you’re unfamiliar with the dreaded deep-dish pizza pan, it’s an ungodly receptacle for all the burnt dough and cheese that you’d think the extra butter would’ve stopped form sticking. You can’t wash it immediately, of course. You have to let them soak by stack until you run out of space. You’d better hope to God that the sinkwater has seeped into pans far enough to loosen the crusts. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself scraping away at the pan for god knows how long, while your supervisor yells at you for being too slow. The final circle of Dante’s Inferno is wasting an hour scrubbing off some burnt cheese with steel wool that’s seen better days.
Washing dishes at home was different. You could move at your own pace and you dealt more with easy things like plates and silverware. If you were in a big family like mine, you also had helpers. In my experience, we spent about as much time talking at the sink as we did at the dinner table. It could take a hell of a long time, yes, but there was something rewarding about it. You weren’t getting paid, but at least you didn’t come out looking like a survivor from the latest hurricane. On the other hand, if you have a big family, then you probably know that some folks are downright terrible at washing the dishes, and I mean terrible! We all know that parents have kids for the sole purpose of making them do chores, but there should at least be an age limit before they take on such responsibilities. There are nights when I wanted to make a Dagwood sandwich, only to end up washing some damned plate over again because some nitwit didn’t spot last night’s meatloaf.
When you live on your own, dishwashing takes on a whole new dynamic. You realize that you’re under no pressure from your supervisor or your family to get them done. I remember going to a friend’s house one summer and making the error of peering into their sink. It was filled to the top with dishes that, by the look of it, had been sitting there since Moses crossed the Red Sea. I said to myself, “That’s not gonna happen to me!” Then you get your own sink and you figure, well, I don’t have to wash them now, right? What’s the harm in putting them off until tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week, until you find your sink to be just as filthy as the New York City sewers. This gets worse when you’re in college, why, with exams to study for and twenty page papers to write, you simply don’t have the time to wash those damn dishes anymore. Inevitably, the easiest option is to buy paper plates, plastic sporks, and solo cups.
At this point, you’re probably wondering where the “art of dishwashing” part of this essay comes in, as all I’ve done so far is gripe. I enjoy griping, but that’s beside the point. Tom Sawyer found a way to convince every boy in his neighborhood that painting a fence was fun. With dishes, I had to much the same. Not so much fun, but tolerable. What could I learn from washing the dishes? What wisdom could be gathered from scrubbing the smell of tomato sauce from the all the pots on spaghetti night? After consulting with my friends at the International Union of Dishwashers, of which, I am a member, I came up with these:
The first thing I learned was to pay attention to the little things. When I worked at the pizzeria, I was often hit with complaints that my dishes were too greasy. The problem being that the grease was damn near invisible. You’d need a magnifying glass with the power of the Hubble Telescope to spot that shit. You had to acquire the skill of not only seeing the grease, but also feeling it. This is tricky when your hands are already greasy from having dealt with a stack of deep-dish pizza pans, but it isn’t impossible. I learned that the littlest thing, even something as little as grease, can cause a lot of trouble for people down the road. (If a co-worker goes for a smoke break and leaves their cigarette on the greasy stack of deep-dish pizza pans, the whole pizzeria could catch fire.) I think that dishwashers, the good ones at least, are very attuned to these nuances. After all, how many times have you received a fork at a restaurant that had some unsightly spots on it? Didn’t that make you want to get up and leave on the spot? The food served at the restaurant could have been delectable, and maybe every other fork was washed cleaner than a baby’s bottom, but by the end of the day, it made no difference. The one small inconvenience was enough to turn you off of the whole experience. This much is often true of life.
The second thing I learned is that everyone has their own way of washing the dishes. Some of these people can be dish-snobs. They see your way of washing dishes as inadequate to theirs, so they constantly try to correct you. This happens quite a lot in the workforce. It almost played out like a comedy skit. On my first day I had a supervisor show me the ropes. I followed their advice as best as I could, only to have another advisor show me a different way. So, wanting to please them, I shifted to their way, only to have the old advisor came back and scold me. The worst part came when I was in middle of washing the dishes, and another one of the supervisors interrupted me and completely redid my arrangement. It was pure anarchy. There are also the soap-hoarders. This is more a family nuisance, especially a family low on cash. They’ll yell at you for putting too much dish soap on the sponge, even when the sponge is desperately in need of it. Any dishwasher worth his salt knows that you need to see the white suds spring out from the pores with each squeeze. Your family, however, is too uncivilized to understand this, so they’ll constantly refill the soap bottle with water instead of simply buying another bottle. The repeated effect of this is to only have a soap bottle with water, which, believe me, does little against the chicken pot. Everyone has their own way of washing the dishes, but they should keep these ways to themselves. Unless they earned their degree from dishwashing school, they’re often winging it as much as you are.
The third thing I learned is that dishwashing is all about self-hypnotism. I referred to the example from Tom Sawyer earlier. He tricked all the boys in his neighborhood into painting the fence white, but was it really a trick? There is something undeniably relaxing in the act. The smooth feel of the brush against wood, and watching the old wood be absorbed with creamy white. It’s kind of hypnotic, isn’t it? The act of dishwashing is very much the same. Admit it, you kind of like watching the mashed potatoes slide off the plate, or the look of your wine glass wearing a new coat of soapsuds. Cleaning is a very cathartic act. You scrub away all your stress, anger, pain, only this time it takes the form of broccoli, peanut butter, and ketchup. It’s almost like taking a bath after a long, tiresome day. It does so much for your soul as well as your body. The Japanese understand this very well. Maybe I should write a self-help book like Dishwashing For The Soul or The Zen of Dishwashing? It might even get an endorsement from Marianne Williamson.
The fourth thing is…why in the hell are we still washing dishes? I mean, you’d think that after 100,000 years of human history, we’d have invented a way out of doing this crap. It’s one of those basic questions about how inadequate will are at fixing the nuisances of life, like why haven’t we made rats and roaches extinct yet? Yes, I know that dishwashing machines exist, but they clearly haven’t abolished dishwashing, now have they? These machines haven’t been employed into restaurant kitchens yet. They’re too slow to be efficient. I’ve also eaten at homes that have dishwashing machines, and to my horror, you often have to rinse the dishes before you can even put them into machine! What a waste! Forget about going to Mars! This country should have a national goal of abolishing dishwashing by 2020!
