And Don't Forget the Rubber Gloves

We don’t have a dishwasher, so we wash our dishes the old school way—with a soapy scrubbing tool and a quick rinse. It takes a total of 5 seconds per dish and we really don’t mind it.

Last week my grandma and my brother came to visit. My grandma had her own way of doing dishes, which required plugging both sides of the sink, filling one side with clean water and one side with soapy water, soaking the dishes for 3.472 minutes and then scrubbing them with a dish cloth, then transferring the dishes over to the clean water side (which became soapy and needed refilling after every 3 dishes), and finally draining both sides and rinsing each dish one last time. It seemed like a lot of extra work, but I know better than to challenge Grandma on something like washing dishes, so I went along with it.

One day while she was here, Grandma walked in on me washing dishes my own way. She wanted to help, but she couldn’t figure out which stage of the process I was in. She started to plug one side of the sink, then moved to the other before I told her that I normally wash dishes this way and it only takes a second…see? She observed for a while and then walked away bewildered.

The next day Grandma walked in on my brother washing dishes, and he happened to be washing them the same easy way that I use—the normal way. Completely surprised that he knew about the easy method, Grandma asked him, “Did your sister teach you to wash dishes that way?”