Because of various circumstances, including a period of ill health, I found myself in need of help cleaning, so I accepted the recommendation of a cleaning service. I found the service to be largely satisfactory. Actually, that’s an understatement. It was heavenly. However, I was not impressed with the way the cleaners loaded the dishwasher – several of the dishes had to be rewashed as a result of the way they had been positioned.
I mentioned this observation to someone, who told me “Women can’t load dishwashers.” Taking an informal poll of an unscientific selection of people, I found that all the men agreed with this statement, whereas the women were generally just offended by the notion.
What are your unscientific generalizations on this topic?
In my household whoever starts loading the dishwasher has to finish. I hate how my husband loads it, and he hates how I load it. So I guess we are even.
I can generalize on a lot of topics, as I believe there are many, many innate differences between men and women and in general, the sexes can be split up fairly well into who does what better.
However, in this case, I think that there are just too many variables to generalize. I load my dishwasher like a freaking engineer- I am very specific and thoughtful about it. Might sound like a man’s style, but I am a woman. Your housecleaners are, in general, from a low socio-economic background and not exactly genuises, or they wouldn’t be housecleaners, therefore I’d expect them to not load a dishwasher in the most efficient way possible. (Not saying *I *am a genius, I’m not, just that I do load my dishwasher like one.) My ex-husband is a real nerd, and thinks like an engineer, but he couldn’t load the dishwasher very well because he has ADD and couldn’t focus and organize well. I can think of tons of other situations which would affect one’s ability to load a dishwasher well, so I’d say no, you can’t generalize in this situation.
No. Your housecleaners didn’t load the dishwasher as well as you do because it’s not their dishwasher. Dishwashers are persnickety things, and it takes a few weeks, in my experience, before you really learn what works where. Plus, they just probably didn’t care all that much. They’re interested in being quick as well as clean, and it’s quicker to wash a couple of rejects than to carefully and slowly load the dishwasher optimally.
My ex-husband couldn’t load the dishwasher to save his life. He’s a crammer with no sense of where the water will flow. Of course, he accused me of running the dishwasher “half-empty” because I leave enough space between the dishes for water to get at all surfaces. He ended up running the dang thing two or three times per “load” just to get all the rejects clean, whereas my “half-empty” loads would come out spotless. In reality, I fit in about 75% of the dishes he did, so my way was a far more efficient use of resources.
This. My husband and I are equally picky about how to load our dishwasher–we have a system. No one else can do it right, and I wouldn’t expect to do a good job with someone else’s dishwasher.
I am just happy that I don’t have to load it. I load it differently from my husband, and sometimes I will rearrange things to get more in, but in general, I’m not going to complain about the way he does any job I want him to continue doing.
My cleaning service does not do this well, though. But they are excellent at other things. So loading the dishwasher is not something the cleaning service needs to worry about. They are experts at a lot of things, but I can’t really expect them to have read the manual on every dishwasher in creation. (I am not wild about the way the clean the microwave, either, but nobody else wants to clean the microwave, or ever does. So.)
I love my wife with all my heart, but she cannot load a dishwasher to save her life. There’s food still stuck to the plates. Silverware (including knives) is pointing up in the bin. Stuff is backwards with the top of the plate pointed away from the sprayer.
I grew up without one, and when I finally moved into a place that had one, my roomate had to teach me how to load. Of course, she was also the type that would wash before loading into the dishwasher (which makes little sense to me)… So I ended up washing most of the mundane things by hand, anyways, avoiding the dishwasher unless it was ready for a run or it was a big messy thing that I had prewashed and would be served by the dishwasher.
It probably wouldn’t take me long to figure out how to work a specific dishwasher… but I wouldn’t dedicate time to know about it unless it was… well… mine to use!
In my teensy-tiny sample, men (my husband) can’t load a dishwasher, but women (me) can. He crams everything he can in there, with no regard for the path of the water. Considering he dealt with fluid dynamics for a large part of his engineering career, you’d think he’d be better at that.
I’ve never seen these other ways to load a dishwasher. I’m perplexed at what other way it can be done, at least with ours. Cups on top, as they’ll block the water on bottom. Plates on bottom, as there are racks for them. Silverware in the little silverware thing. Bowls on their side, facing where the water comes out.
I’m usually the person with the least common sense in the family, and even I picked this up.
ETA: wait, we do do this think where we run the dishwasher once rather than rinse them by hand. We have harder water, and it takes longer to work. Usually takes two packets.
Oh my God - women are still doing the majority of the housework in spite of all the changes to what else is expected of women, and you’re going to criticize how we do it?
Why would anyone think women can’t load dishwashers?
I did wonder briefly if men had some chromosomal defect that prevented a clear understanding of fluid dynamics, gravity, permeability, and the concept that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, but this was based on a small sample (i.e. one).
Then I saw how my beloved’s sister and mother loaded a dishwasher. I extended my research to include all individuals in my research group (my beloved’s brothers, as reported by their beloveds).
In short, the chromosomal defect is on an autosome; no member of at least two generations of my beloved’s family has a clue as to how to load a dishwasher.
Of four brothers - one does not have dishwasher, one is not allowed to load a dishwasher, one has ‘help’, and one married a woman with the same defect. (One the other hand, three of the four do most of the cooking.)
In short, the inability to load a dishwasher does not appear to be a gender-linked trait.
The refusal to unload a dishwasher? Well, I don’t want things to get ugly here …
That’s a major pet peeve. You rinse if there’s obvious large chunks of food, or if food is crusted on and will probably otherwise stay after the wash. Everything else will be taken care of by the disposal grinder. It does seem that more women are unaware of this than men, although my sample size is small.
I don’t know the answer to this generalization. However, if true it may have something to do with the fact that men are better at spatial tasks (this is a fact, not a generalization). Perhaps they are better at dish Tetris than women.
My wife and I would agree that I’m better at it than her (and it’s my one more-or-less assigned domestic maintenance chore), but I have no basis for generalization.
For what it’s worth, I also rinse, and generally wipe down with a washcloth, everything going into the dishwasher, since I find that annoying residue remains here and there if I don’t. Actually washing with soap pre-machine, however, seems ridiculous to me.
*Everyone *is worse at loading the dishwasher than I am.
Because nobody else does it the way I do it. If there was a better method for loading the dishes then I would use it; since I don’t, then logically anyone doing it differently than me must be doing it ‘wrong’.
I didn’t vote in the poll because I didn’t think any of the answers really applied. It’s not a case of ‘I can’t generalize’…it’s more that the matter is far too subjective to draw any conclusions from.