Last
week I described my eternal struggle with the various
assortment of kitchen saving devices I found in our home.
This highly acclaimed, articulate and well-written article
was assaulted by a number of well meaning housewives who
thought I was making fun of women and the American
kitchen.
Trust me,
I wasn’t.
What I am
trying hard to describe is how we as Americans have gone
from a manual can opener society to one where the average
kitchen almost needs it’s own generator to power all of
the extra labor saving devices we have dearly love.
I tend to
think that men and women both think along the same lines
when it comes to coffee makers, electric knives and such.
There doesn’t seem to be much controversy over their
intended use and purpose.
The only
two items that I find cause a great deal of disruption in
the sexes are the dishwasher and the garbage disposal.
Work with
me here. I have found that women tend to wash all of the
dishes BEFORE they go into the dishwasher. Be honest, is
this you? Men on the other hand like to test the scrubbing
ability of any make or model no matter how old it might be
just to see if that plate of month old dried fried eggs
yokes will come clean the first time. You ever watch those
commercials where they dump some dishwasher soap into the
machine and put all of the dishes inside with caked on
spaghetti and whatever without so much as rinsing them
first?
Think
about it, in reality this wouldn’t be a woman standing
around trying to see if they came clean, would it? Nope,
it’d be a group of men trying to see if that tough, baked
on food crud come actually come off without anyone trying
to clean the pots and pans first.
Every
woman I’ve ever been around washes the dishes first and
then puts them into the dishwasher, which in my mind and
that of most other men I’ve talked to, defeats the whole
purpose of having a dishwasher in the first place. Why put
clean dishes into a machine that is supposed to wash
dishes? Isn’t this what the machine is designed to do in
the first place?
In our
house I’m always testing our dishwasher, I sneak in a
dirty one from time to time without the required rinsing
and scrubbing my wife demands. It’s my own form of
rebellion to see that bowl or plate come out just as clean
as the others.
The other
household tool, which I find in great contention, is the
garbage disposal. Men tend to think of the household
disposal as a sort of inside tree limb shredder. If they
made one with five or six horsepower, I’d be standing in
line to get it. I’d even go for a gasoline-powered
disposal if there were such a thing on the market.
“Amaze
your friends with your new pull start HEMI, 5 and ½
horsepower, TURBO model disposal.”
Men want
a disposal that can eat a whole head of cabbage or an
entire stalk of celery at one time, not just one wimpy
little piece at a time. We want grinding power.
Women
seem to want to put things into the disposal like, old
milk, breadcrumbs or flower petals.
Men would
like to have a disposal with enough grinding power to chew
up nails or the occasional unwanted spoon we got from some
distant relative.
“Oops…there goes the last piece of that lovely genuine
silver plated flatware your Aunt Matilda gave us for our
wedding…seems those things just don’t last, do they?”
Men seem
to want to test the operational capacity of just about
everything on the market. We want to push the envelope and
see what these things we’re spending our hard earned money
on can really do. We want fast cars to actually go fast.
We want shredders that say they take ten pages at a time
to actually do that, shred ten pages at a time, not five.
Fortunately we have women to keep us on the right side of
sanity and from falling off the edge of the world. They
also tend to make us realize that the labels on some items
we buy can be somewhat misleading and understood only by
women.
Diapers…
for example, when they say 8 to 12 pounds, they are
referring to the size of the baby not the capacity.
Have a
good week.
