All is not fair in love and water

'Like the adage that there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't, apparently it's the same with dishwashers'

Cork, Ireland. Picture: Wavebreakmedia Ltd

IT'S just not fair. Packing the dishwasher, I mean.

Like the adage that there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't, apparently it's the same with dishwashers.

They are simple devices that save hours of tedious kitchen chores and still use less water than washing the by hand (a statistic possibly made up by Fisher & Paykel).

However, if dishwashers are so simple why are so many people unable to pack them properly? Well, maybe not so many people, umm, to be fair, maybe it's just Ms L.

If one is efficient, dishwashers are like the Tardis.

They hold stacks of dirty kitchen stuff, but only if they're packed correctly.

Putting like next to like frees up space for other items and looks good. A well-packed dishwasher is a beautiful thing.

But not to Ms L. She blindly puts mixing bowls over the top of bread and butter plates, inefficiently stacked next to unmatched coffee mugs, before placing a colander over the lot.

Everyone knows you cannot put colanders in dishwashers, it wastes space and looks awful.

It's wrong on so many levels, speaking of which, on the top rack she puts things such as take-away containers which invariably overturn in the maelstrom immediately you hit the eco button, then fill with water and the gritty remnants of the tablet specially designed and impregnated with a secret formula to stop your glasses streaking.

Why can't she feel the joy of a row of equal-sized dish plates next to a neat line of breakfast bowls juxtaposed beside the cutlery all nicely arranged into their own compartments which not only makes them easy to unpack, their beauty is worthy of Instagram, perhaps even an Ahn Do episode?

But the real issue here is that Ms L. accuses me of doing a lousy job of cleaning the bathroom under the mistaken guise that I will not be asked to do it again, yet she does the same with the dishwasher. It's not fair.

Oh well, better pack last night's red-resplendent Riedels I suppose, Ms L. never gets them right.

Originally published as All is not fair in love and water