(I'm not writing an entry about DB today. This cat has managed to fight through so many physical and health related issues and thrive that I'm not about to write him off yet. I'll wait for the vet to tell me he has Feline Ebola and Flesh-Eating Whisker Herpes before I'll begin to worry.)
There are certain labor-saving devices with questionable labor-saving properties. Take those infomercial vegetable slicer jobbers for instance. Any negligible time they save you slicing vegetables, you lose (and more) cleaning them up. Or take all of the other very good examples I don't feel like taking the time to think of. There are many of them, I assure you.
Dishwashers aren't part of that class. The time saved by dishwashers is vast and easily measurable. I lived at my old house for over ten years without a dishwasher (I installed one for our tenants only after we moved) and hence doing dishes was the chore I looked forward to least. A double-sink full of dishes, washed manually, could easily take an hour to an hour and a half to clean (to be fair, I'm a bit anal about my dish cleanliness). We have a dishwasher finally in our new house and now 1), there generally isn't an accumulated sink full of dishes anymore as washing them is easy, and 2) when there is an accumulation of dishes it only take 10 to 15 minutes to load them.
That's a time savings worth dropping a few hundred dollars for. And clothes washers and dryers? They're probably even more useful than the dishwasher. Who has a stream running back behind their house, or the desire to hang their clothes outside in the back yard? That might have been fine when people had no choice in the matter, but in practice it's a ridiculous premise.
So dishwashers, good. Buying a new set of dinnerware each month to avoid having to wash your sink full of dirty dishes, bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment