Time to go home

You know it’s going to be a bad day when the first email you have to send out is something like this:

I hate to have to send out a note like this, but Dave tagged me with being this month’s Kitchen Etiquette Czar.

Will whomever is taking out the one item out of the dishwasher, leaving it in an unknown state of cleanliness, either (a) finish emptying the dishwasher or (b) stop doing it?

When you do this, the “dishwasher done” light goes off. The dishwasher’s contents look clean, but no one can be sure. This presents a dilemma when the kitchen faeries see dirty stuff in the sink: do they subject my colleagues to the vagaries of bacterial mischief so they complete the 97-second task of emptying the dishwasher and remove the dirties from the sink? Or, do they add the dirty stuff, run the dishwasher a second time and doom a thousand** baby seals? Or, do they just let it become someone else’s problem? Colleagues, sea-critters, procrastination… this time they opted for emptying it.


+Probably far less than a thousand. Okay, at most one. Regardless, the faeries hate running the dishwasher unnecessarily.

My day got progressively worse, ending up with a ride home through some scary winds. Renton, the closest official reporting facility, had gusts of 34mph, though the I-90 corridor seemed to be pushing higher at times. It was so predictable that I had to stop three times and wait for a break.

6 thoughts on “Time to go home”

  1. Is 97 seconds an average time?

    I rode through the Kent/Auburn valley on Wednesday, where the winds shifted from tail- to head- to cross-winds. The tailwind portion of the ride was pleasant. The headwind portion was double the workout. The crosswind portion tried to shove me into the Green River. The section of my front fender that extends beyond the fork was catching the wind and oscillating, waving at me wildly as if to say “Hey, isn’t this a little bit ridiculous?”.

  2. Wind? Ack! I hope the wind gusts die down on Sunday morning. I don’t want to have to fight the wind while making a road race debut during the IceBreaker TT.

  3. We KNOW you timed it, and that’s what we all love about you.
    Debbie!

    Is 97 seconds an average time?

    For the dish faeries. It’s a corporate dishwasher, so the contents are all cups, plates and flatware. The flatware takes most of the time because people don’t point them the wrong way and I grab the sharp end of the fork.

    The section of my front fender that extends beyond the fork was catching the wind and oscillating, waving at me wildly as if to say “Hey, isn’t this a little bit ridiculous?”.

    See if you had a steel bike, it would have sun “Are you f*king nuts?” Carbon-forks (still) sing like angels.

  4. As a former employee in your workplace, I am simply amazed how bad people are with kitchen etiquette at that place. Always been my pet peeve. Heck, my current workplace, people are just as bad or worse. I am on my microwave soapbox here…

  5. Oh, Jim…I’m so with you on this. As part of my new job duties (same company; new job), I’m responsible for the general health and welfare of our small office building. So, when we have mice in February (yes, it’s a 60 year old building), I’m the one people run to. I’m also the one who has to send out the e-mails that go like this “People, we have mice. This means wipe up your crumbs and seal the plastic containers with the loaves of bread in them! If the mice can’t eat here they won’t come back.” Needless to say, I think the relationship between intelligence and ability to do simple kitchen related tasks that require “practical” intelligence is inversely proportional.

    And is 97 seconds the average time? You guys must have a tiny dishwaser. 😉

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