Frances Whiting: Living under the rule of a dishwasher dictator

When you’re a ‘bunger’, life under the strict rule of the Dishwasher Dictator is not easy, write Frances Whiting. He must position crockery with the same agonising precision as if he were defusing a bomb.

Marriage.

Co-habitating. Mating for Life. It’s a funny old concept isn’t it?

On good days, it’s romantic, wonderful, comforting and cozily familiar, like popping on a pair of your favourite shoes, or seeing Bert Newton pop up on the tele.

On bad days, you get home and your husband has restacked the dishwasher. Again.

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Or at least, that’s what happens with my husband, also known as the Dishwasher Dictator. The man cannot help himself. Every single time I stack the dishwasher, quick as a flash, he’s in there, poking his head around the top rack.

Dishwasher dictator. Picture: Jonathan Bentley

Now, I am perfectly capable of doing this particular household chore — it’s not that hard, is it? You just bung in all the glasses and cups at the top, you bung in all the plates and pans at the bottom, and you bung all the cutlery in that little basket thing.

And therein, I suspect, lies the problem: all that “bunging”.

The Dishwasher Dictator does not “bung”. No, he does not. Instead he places the crockery and cutlery into our dishwasher with the same sort of agonisingly slow precision as if he were a crack member of the SAS defusing a bomb.

Personally, I think either method is fine, or as I said the other day on my way to do the grocery shopping: “If you want to watch your life force slowly draining out of you while you pre-rinse the dessert spoons, fine, I’m going to get out there and live!”

The thing is, the Dishwasher Dictator is by no means the only man displaying this obsessive behaviour.

Make way, there’s cutlery that need restacking. Picture: The Hurt Locker

Most of my friends’ husbands do the same thing, and I want to know what’s going on.

Some of these men will actually step over a pile of clothes on the floor to avoid picking them up, but woe betide the person in their household who dares to put the forks in the cutlery basket with the prongs down. Or is it up?

I can’t remember — I just bung ’em in, as I said.

So what is it? Is there a subliminal message these men are trying to send when they restack our dishwashers, sighing heavily?

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I think there might be. I think these men might be saying something along the lines of: “I live three streets away from where I grew up, I drive a people mover, I mow the lawn on the weekends and I spend my spare time ferrying my children from one event to another. I no longer ride a motorbike, go to three-day rock music festivals and think about getting a Bruce Springsteen tattoo. I feel emasculated in pretty much every facet of my daily life, but there is one place where I still am King. There is one corner of this house I claim as my own, and there is one place where I am Master of all I survey, and that place is in front of the Kelvinator.”

So what do you think? Am I on to something? And could any of the many, many men who read this column and pretend their wife makes them, enlighten me?

Thank you, The Bunger.

@franceswhiting