It’s now all the rage to have two dishwashers. They sit side by side beneath the kitchen benchtop, so that when one dishwasher is busy, the other is available to receive additional items of dirty crockery. That way you never have to endure the sight of a few coffee cups spoiling the line of your designer kitchen.
When did we develop such unbelievably high standards? In the days before dishwashers, the sink was perpetually stacked with dirty dishes. I remember share houses in which there was never a single clean plate or bowl available. Sit down for breakfast and you’d have to first excavate an old bowl and chisel off a layer of week-old Weet-Bix. I don’t know what it is about dried Weet-Bix, but they really should build nuclear bunkers out of it.
That’s more like it, let the dirty dishes stack up for a while.Credit: iStock
The period before dishwashers was not a nirvana, I understand that, but do we really need two of them? After all, duelling dishwashers are only the starting point. Some people now have two bathroom sinks, side by side, sunk into the same vanity unit. The idea is that he can shave and she can apply a bit of lippy – or vice-versa, please yourself – while domestic harmony reigns supreme.
There’s also a super-sized shower with two nozzles and space to wash with a friend, as well as an outdoor kitchen with oven, fridge, dishwasher and sink, just in case you become sick of cooking using your indoor oven, fridge, dishwasher and sink. Oh, and if you live in a two-storey house, some people now have two vacuum cleaners, so they need not heave the machine up and down the stairs.
All marvellous ideas, I’m sure, but who is cleaning these two bathroom sinks? Who is scrubbing the super-sized shower? Who is cleaning out not one but two filters in the twin dishwashers? And what’s the impact of this doubling-up on the planet?
On my experience, every appliance breaks down every 3.1 years, a few weeks after the warranty expires, so if you double the number of appliances, you’ll also double the amount of time you are driving around town trying desperately to find someone who’ll fix the mongrel. And then double your landfill when you fail to find that willing repairer.
Why have we allowed our lives to become so dominated by domestic drudgery?Credit: iStock
One of the paradoxes of the modern world is that we’ve developed labour-saving devices which don’t seem to save any labour. A new book, After Work by the social scientists Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, finds that the amount of time spent on domestic tasks has hardly changed since the 1870s – despite the arrival of washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and a score of other devices.
The book argues that all the time saved by using these devices has been wiped out by increasingly high standards of neatness, cleanliness and luxury. Since a modern vacuum cleaner can lift every skerrick of fluff, there’s no excuse for the carpet to not be perpetually perfect, upstairs and down.
They’ve got a point. Ask Google “how often should you wash your sheets” and the standard answer now is “at least once a week”, which I’d wager is double what it was in the era of copper and the mangle. Certainly, we now favour a complete change of clothes every day and at least one daily shower, maybe two, in a way that would have seemed weird a century ago.
Children are driven to sport and music, rather than making their own way; the smallest transaction requires a blizzard of online form-filling; and there’s even a competitive food culture that makes a delicious meal of chops and mash seem like you’re not really trying.
Other “labour-saving devices” add to our burdens. The internet makes many things possible, but most are at the expense of our leisure time. So we use software to do our own tax, rather than ship it off to an accountant. We book our own travel, rather than visiting the suburban travel agent. We send work emails late into the night...
Privatisation, meanwhile, has brought “competition” to everything from your phone service to your electricity account, the main competition being the one between you and the service provider about how badly they can rip you off before you invest yet more leisure time into locating a better deal.
What happened to the promise of more leisure time, created by better technology? Why have we allowed our lives to become so dominated by domestic drudgery?
Life administration seeps into every corner. Is there anyone, reading this column, who doesn’t have some sort of “to do” list lurking in the back of their mind? A phone bill to pay, some car rego to sort out, a spare dishwasher that is on the blink?
Perhaps you are that well-organised saint who has already done their tax, but for the rest of us, it is there undone, crouching in our consciousness, a reminder that there’s always something we should be doing.
For me, right now? I need to restack the dishwasher. What a shame, only having one of them, it’s still halfway through its cycle. Guess I’ll have to relax, sitting here reading the Herald, right up until it’s done.
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