The proper way to arrange cutlery

How I learned to stop caring about the orderly arrangement of my cutlery rack.

About a year ago our dishwasher quit working, so we ordered a new one online. The new model has a handy cutlery rack at the top of the machine, where you can easily lay forks, knives, spoons, and other small kitchen utenils, such that they are much more likely to be cleaned than in the “cup” style cutlery holder we had in our old dishwasher.

We also have a cleaner who comes once a week to help around the house. And most weeks, she ends up loading the dishwasher.

But she does it ALL WRONG!

She just haphazardly drops the silverware in, facing any which direction, knives mixed with spoons mixed with forks. And all this despite the (not so) clear red labels indicating the knife, spoon, and fork sections of the rack. It’s such an inefficient use of space!

But you know what?

The cutlery gets clean anyway.

And we practically never fill the dishwasher to capacity, so who cares about space efficiency?

In the last year I’ve learned to stop caring about the orderly arrangement of my cutlery rack. I’ve also become less of a pedant about typos in code comments, formatting of YAML files, and other minutiae (even when objectively wrong) that don’t really affect anything. In short: The dishwasher has helped me learn to focus on things that actually matter.

Then again, last week my wife asked me to be more orderly in loading the cutlery rack of the dishwasher, so maybe I’ve gone too far?

Share this