When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to wash the dishes. Apparently, I was too slow, and my brother resented spending his entire evening, waiting for each dish to be lovingly cleaned and placed in the drying rack. He appealed to my Mom, who sentenced me to a lifetime of drying.
Drying dishes has to be about the stupidest thing in the world. If you leave ‘em, they’ll dry by themselves, and you can put them away much more quickly; but my Mom always insisted that the dishes had to be dried. I retaliated by taking so long to dry them, that they air-dried anyway. I really showed her!
We recently spent a week in the Duckabush with my extended family — we often dined together as a group, some twenty strong. Somehow the women-folk got the idea that, since they were doing most of the cooking, we men-folk should manage the clean-up. And so, my brother and I turned the clock back some 40 years, and washed the dishes together.
At least this time I didn’t have to dry — but I was relegated to ‘rinsing’since I still couldn’t be trusted to actually wash.
Well aware that the reward for a job well-done is often another job, we determined to wash the dishes in such a way that we would not be asked again. We shouted and threw dishes and sprayed water at each other, and generally carried on as though we were pillaging the kitchen, much to the amusement of our sons and brother-in-law. And yet, we failed — our plan backfired. Everyone had such fun watching our horseplay, that they called for us to wash dishes the next day as well.
Clearly we needed a better strategy. How do you avoid doing the dishes, gentle reader? Chime in with a comment.
