When I first moved to the U.S. back in the mid-80s, I was impressed by how well things worked. I mean, you have to understand that all around the world — such as in Third World countries like Zimbabwe, India and Italy — things often just do not work as one would expect them to. Whether it’s because they are badly made, or badly assembled, or just operated by fucking idiots (try doing a relatively simple thing like booking a flight out of Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport — which isn’t even in Rome but miles and miles out on the coast, a story for another time) and you’ll soon see that not much works as originally intended.
I am also familiar with concepts such as planned obsolescence, where corporations deliberately design products that will eventually fail or fall to pieces so that you will be forced into buying a new one as a replacement.
But there’s another factor in stuff not working, and this is the one which really, really sets my teeth on edge, and it’s embodied by an appliance which is common in households all over the U.S.: the dish washing machine, or dishwasher.
When I first came over, I fell in live with the dishwasher, because I had never owned one. Most families in South Africa didn’t, either because they had Black servants to hand wash the dishes, or they were too poor to afford such expensive (and they were expensive) machines.
But these GE/Frigidaire/Whirlpool dishwashers? Oh man, there were great. You piled your dishes in, coated with caked-on gravy or food particles or whatever, added a little detergent, and switched the thing on. All sorts of magic would happen behind the closed door, and when the thing stopped running, you waited about ten minutes and then opened the door, and there were your dishes: clean, dry and warm (maybe even still hot) to the touch.
And that was it.
Sadly, that is no longer the case.
Now, you have to pretty much hand wash the dishes first, or at least rinse them into near-cleanliness before loading them into the dishwasher, then do the same stuff as above and then, when the buzzer sounds or a light goes on, you open the door to find that your dishes are not completely clean, still wet or at best damp, and in fact, many times you will have to rinse them off and do the whole fucking thing all over again — with no guarantee that the outcome will be any different.
And why is this?
Because the dirty fingers of government have been stuck into the operation. Thanks t an excess of Green zealotry, dishwashers can’t use as much water as they used to so the spray can’t be as fierce (and effective), and the heating element has been turned from its furnace-like operation into something that wouldn’t keep you warm on a cool autumn day if you gripped it in your fist.
Our dishwashers, in short, have been turned from appliances that once worked perfectly at their intended function into flabby little things that are the equivalent of convict labor: surly, unproductive and unreliable.
There’s no point in complaining about this because Green Worship has become so ingrained in our culture that anyone daring to rail against the Great God EnergySmart (blessings be upon its name) might well face severe sanction and even penalties.
Such as happened to my friend Patterson when he rewired his 2015-model dishwasher to 1980 specs and made it work properly. Me, I’m too stupid to do something like that, and too old to want to kick against the pricks in that manner.
So my private little rebellion against this nonsense is that I just wash my dishes again and again until they are as clean as I want them to be. (I do the same with my low-flow-low-use low-efficiency toilet, which requires two and sometimes three flushes to take care of the old #2 bowel movement discharge, and has been know to rise to five, after a particularly stupendous roast beef dinner.)
Or I power-rinse my dishes with steaming-hot water before loading them, using twice as much electricity (via the water heater) as I would have used to run the dishwasher if it was working properly.
End result: I use twice or three times as much water and much more electricity to wash my dishes as I would have in 1986.
And all this just so I can have clean dishes to put away in the cupboard. Or else I do my part for the environment by using paper plates which don’t need washing and just end up in the landfill.
I know this sounds like a really pointless and futile gesture, doesn’t it? But it’s far less ummm radical than, say, were I to assassinate the CEO of Whirlpool or the politicians responsible for turning once-efficient U.S. products into pathetic Third World failures.
Isn’t it?
