dish washing machine: technology runs amok

back two octobers ago when we bought our house we noticed the newly and cheaply redone kitchen included a dishwasher. now, i recall the dishwasher that howled in my parents' kitchen in the eighties, a beast that required its victims to wash all dishes before loading them, carefully -CAREFULLY- into the racks. it seems to me there was a dishwasher in ann arbor, in a split-level house where i lived with three folks i'd met and begun to adore in syracuse. i do not have clear memories of it- the possible dishwasher- probably because if it was there i didn't have a passion for using it, not like the passion i had for the washer and dryer living in the basement under a ceiling that would eventually fall on us. i have no passion for dishwashers. i have lived most of my life without them and have found them to be cumbersome, slow, wasteful.

so when we moved on into the house and found that neither water nor electricity had yet found its way to the steel thing huddled under the cabinet, i didn't really care. it seemed more trouble than it was worth to hook up something that created its own monsoons just for the dishes of two people. but recently the house needed help with its awful plumbing and a few weeks later with its still-hooked-up-to-a-fuse-box electrical world. the sweetie thought, since folks were already doing work, it would be just swell if we hooked up an object that would require massive amounts of both water and electricity at the same time. why not?

when we arrived friday night the final bit of work was done and we found a few mugs on the top rack of dishwaser, things we'd put in there two octobers ago. don't worry. they weren't really dirty, just fresh from being unpacked and newspapery. they'd been waiting all this time there in the dark. by sunday, we'd managed to dirty enough dishes to load up the machine and give it a spin. we tossed everything right in there without washing first. ha! but when the sweetie put a bowl on the bottom rack, the part of my brain that was etched some time around 1981 kicked in and i screamed, "NO! YOU CAN'T PUT BOWLS ON THE BOTTOM! THE TOP STUFF WON'T GET CLEAN!" with only moderate mockery, the sweetie pointed to two very separate fanlike sprayers. one for each rack, top and bottom. and i marveled at such brilliant technology. it took us a few tries to open the little tray for the soap but we're intelligent folks and eventually i accidentally hit the completely invisible latch on the side of the soap bucket. bingo. we filled the bucket with soap. we closed the door.

there were quite a few choices on the dial, so we chose the "standard wash" one. the machine started. with so many other advances in technology i suppose i sort of expected the thing to be quiet. quieter. it was not. it sounded like a truck running over a stile. like a helicopter taking off. it washed. it rinsed. and then it washed again. at least it sounded like a second wash. wash is one sort of noisy and rinse is another kind of noisy and we heard both at least twice. i got worried. perhaps all those movies about technology coming to life and taking over were actually beginning with our own little dishwasher. "you shouldn't meddle in things you don't understand." like dishwashers. i cannot even begin to explain how likely it would be for our own dishwasher to come to life and also have o.c.d. wash. rinse. repeat. perseveration. we searched for the manual. another cycle started. after more than an hour of cycling, the sweetie produced a manual that promised us 84 minutes of washing, rinsing and drying, with a total of two washes, three rinses and a dry. 84 minutes. and the short cycle is 75 minutes. only two rinses. wash. rinse. repeat.

i said as many unkind things as i could about the machine, its maker and the whole idea of dishwashers. wasteful. ugly. loud. stupid. steam started coming out the little vent at the top. the drying part of the cycle. that awful steam dishwashers make that smells like plastic. tan plastic, in my opinion, the most tedious of plastics. and i determined right then and there that i'd never use that monstrous thing again. but a little later i decided to open up the shiny metal front and i stared at something i'd never seen. dishes clean as if angels brought them down new from heaven. the saucepan i'd used the night before for making hot chocolate is one of those brown pyrex things i've had since 1990. it has spent most of the last ten years with a halo of scratches (the years before, i wasn't what you'd call "cooking food" and it mostly rested) and burnt spots like bruises along the bottom. until today. there were pint glasses so clean i would have missed seeing them but for their edges cutting into the light. silverware gleamed. it's the way the world looks after an evening thunderstorm, clearer than you've ever seen it. i closed the door quickly.

later i showed the sweetie, who marveled at the beauty just as i had. we put the dishes away. i felt a little sorry for the dishes already in the cabinets, shabby through no fault of their own. they will get their turn.