It’s truly ingenious, how companies keep coming up with supposedly labour-saving devices, and people keep buying them. We LOVE the idea that something can save us a bit of time, don’t we? Who doesn’t, really? Who out there would turn away something that might really make their life simpler and save them some time?
The catch, of course, is that very few of these devices ever actually save you time. Often they cost you MORE time than the way you were doing it before.
For example, I have a food processor. It has this wonderful little device that is supposed to knead bread. It can only handle one loaf at a time, but that’s okay. It sometimes works, when the gods are smiling and I get the mixture exactly right. And when it does work, it’s lovely. It speeds up bread making because I don’t have to stand there for 10 minutes kneading dough – my little machine does that for me. Instead, I get to spend 20 minutes afterward cleaning up the machine. You ever used one of these to make dough? It gets everywhere. Place you wouldn’t think stuff could get into gets clogged with snotty, sticky little bits of dough.
I guess what I’m doing is not actually saving time, but trading time. I save a few minutes beforehand so that I can spend more time afterward, when the pressure’s off and time’s not so critical.
But, of all of the supposed labour-saving devices out there, there is one that is the grandaddy of all ruses. We all have one – they’re everywhere – and we think we can’t live without it. Yes, that device is the dishwasher.
Dishwashers are truly puzzling devices. They don’t really WASH the dishes, they just kinda gently RINSE the dishes. My wife – I love my wife, she is a fabulous lady, but she’s very naive and trusting when it comes to dishwashers. She actually believes that a dishwasher will wash dishes, like there are little magical dishwasher’s elves – you know, like the Shoemaker’s elves but different – inside the thing that will clean your dishes when it’s running. Unfortunately, there are no such elves. Anyone who owns one of these machines knows that, in order for them to work, you have to wash your dishes BEFORE you put them into the machine. That’s the only way they’ll come clean. It’s like cleaning the house before the maid arrives.
Yet we all have fallen for this, and we all keep washing our dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, because it saves us time…?
