Dishwasher Fun

I have recently learned that my wife and I are not the only ones who argue about how to load and unload a dishwasher.  For many years I would load the dishwasher, only to find that when I went to unload it many of the dishes seemed to be in a different place than where I had put them.  For a while, I tried to let this go, deciding that our dishwasher was perhaps one of those living appliances like in the movie The Brave Little Toaster and it was just moving things around to mess with me.  But the more I thought about it, the more I considered that perhaps the movie The Brave Little Toaster could have just been made up and there wasn’t really a living toaster stranded out there in a Summer home that the family had just sold.  Now, just forget about how I know so much about that movie and let’s stick to my not so brave little dishwasher conundrum.  So, then it happened, one day I heard my wife say something about the way I load the dishwasher to someone and I said, “How do you know how I load the dishwasher” and she said “Because I have to rearrange everything before running it”.  Well that just totally blew my mind!  Because you see, I have never considered that there might be a right and a wrong way to load a dishwasher. I just assumed that once you got all the dishes in there, and if you were able to get the door closed and latched, success!!  Modern technology will do the rest. While she had a lot of rules and regulations for loading the dishwasher.  I was obviously totally unaware of the How To Load Your Dishwasher manual, which must get as much attention as the How To Iron Your Socks booklet or the Water Drinking for Amateurs guide. She puts things in nice even rows facing the same way and tells me that I put things in all willy-nilly and how one plate goes this way and the other plate angles away from it rather than sitting right beside it, and then I toss a cup into the mix right between bowls and woohoo, contact the flippin authorities!  So she is thinking I’m just putting things in randomly while she is being organized about the whole thing.  But what she doesn’t know is that I have put great thought into how I load the dishwasher and in fact I am trying to create total chaos within the confines of said appliance, brave or not, while it is in the wash cycle. You see, when you put things in all cattywompus (yes I looked it up and that’s a word…ish), the water hits the dishes and shoots off in a crazy direction hitting the other things and going totally wild as it can’t escape the maze of angles and height changes that I have created! It’s Dishwasher Chaos Theory! While with her way the water will just shoot down a row and miss everything in some cases! Everything I tell you! For example, picture neat orderly rows of chairs, and you are the water. You can walk right down between them without hitting them right? Now try walking through my crazy ‘chair-bortion’ (Patent Pending: Chair-Bortion is a word creation of John Robinson Made Up Words incorporated, any unauthorized use of….well, you get it) where some are tipped over and others are askew (severely askew) and there isn’t a space between them. Just see if you can walk through them without bumping a shin!  Clearly years of experience walking through chairs has gifted me with the ability needed to figure out angles and ricocheting and all things that would help water to clean a plate.  And do not get me started on unloading the silverware.  That’s where she thinks chaos rules!  So yes, we have finally had it out about the proper way to load and unload the dishwasher and we’re going to just have to agree to disagree.  But I will tell you this, she was the last to unload it and as God is my witness, today in the drawer I found a fork in with the spoons!