Dishing and swishing

In my office, the men take out the mail, and the women clean the kitchen.

No, seriously. Everybody’s got 1-week rotations of one of those duties, and it’s split by gender. I guess it’s because guys are able to carry more mail-crates down to their cars and over to the post office. Or because the owner’s a guy and he doesn’t want to wipe down the kitchen and load/unload the dishwasher.

Myself, I don’t use any of the office dishes, silverware, glasses, mugs, etc. No, I’m content to use only my own stuff, wash it myself, and spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. If you smelled our ‘fridge, you’d do the same.

This morning, I noticed a big pile of dishes in the sink. The dishwasher was running, which was odd, since we normally run it at the end of the day. Maybe last week’s kitchen patroller forgot to run it, I thought.

Around 90 minutes later, I refilled my water bottle and noticed that the dishwasher was still running. Now I was puzzled. Around lunchtime, I found out the horrible truth: I am living in a world of cretins. I’ve always suspected it, but now I have proof.

See, whoever had kitchen duty last week — and I’m afraid to look on the calendar to find out who it was — did her work as charged: she rinsed the dishes that our less considerate coworkers left in the sink, loaded the dishwasher, and added the two Electrasol detergent tablets per cycle.

She just didn’t think to remove the tablets from their individual plastic wrappers.

So, for a week, the dishwasher ran hot-water cycles with a pair of plastic-sealed tabs sitting in the detergent container. They melted. Again and again. And you wonder why NJ is the cancer capital of the northeast.

Years ago, the guy who hired me once described one of our coworkers as “the stupidest person still able to feed herself.” I think we’ve lowered the bar.