Isn't a "detritus-chewing drain" a garbage disposal?
I'm happy that in today's strip, Al has returned to using the proper spelling of Migraina. That "y" in there totally threw me off.
As for the content...yeah. I admit it. I totally do this. (Did this. I don't have a dishwasher in my current apartment.) Because my mom does it, probably. Now, I don't have to get everything off the dishes, but I definitely scrape off a lot of it. It helps keep the dishwasher clean, I imagine, and it's really not that much effort. I can't really explain it. But rinsing doesn't mean cleaning, you know; it just means getting off the extra food remnants. But would she really call it "the machine"? That just rings false.
My question is, Did Migraina do the rinsing business with her old dishwasher as well? If she didn't, then yeah, this makes no sense. If she did do it before, well, it's habit.
Love the pageboy-haircutted son next to her.
Labels: cleaning, Crap Every Time reader, Luggly, Migraina
posted by Barb @ 12:08 PM
9 comments
9 Comments:
Here's the way I worded my suggestion in email to Al Scaduto:
Al,
I've followed and enjoyed your comic for quite some time, and have a suggestion for a subject for it:
When our automatic dishwasher quit on us, my wife insisted on getting the best replacement available: high temperature scrub, sanitizing rinse, detritus-chewing rain...the works!
But when it comes time to actually put the dishes in for cleaning, she insists that everyone in the family rinse the plates clean of grime, first!
What the heck was I paying for????
I had expected Al to translate the idea into "Scadutonese", but then I was shocked to find so much of my actual wording in the final product! Has overexposure to TDIET affected my own phrasing, or was I subconsciously emulating Al in hopes it would improve my submission's chances? This may be a clue as to why the dialogue is sometimes extremely awkward: Al makes a noble attempt to include as much of his readers' literal submissions as he can.
Glad to see this is something that not only my wife "does every time." And yes, the new machine does have a "detritus-chewing drain", a selling point that has yet to fully pay for itself since everybody else in the family rinses off all their plates into the garbage disposal. I, however, load the washer with plenty of mucky dinnerware, and like any decent quality dishwashing machine, our unit handles the extra grime just fine, thank you.
P.S. I'm grateful Al didn't throw in a "O-->The urge to clean her grime". It's bad enough that my lovely wife gets played by "Migraina"; good thing Al correctly perceived that this is not an annoyance that would inspire fantasies of violent retribution against her!
Now that suggestions sent in by readers of this blog are being used in the strip, has it crossed some kind of meta-threshold where the only people paying attention to TDIET are actively mocking it?
Wow, I'm impressed with how Scaduto actually used your words (my question for you--are those your words, or from the dishwasher's packaging?).
And really, your wife should be honored to be Migraina. Perhaps from now on, I'll refer to you as Luggly.
I like the dollar signs in the speech bubble. When I was younger, if I saw dollar signs in a speech bubble I would pronounce them like S's. So here, Luggly would be saying something like "G'bye, sss...sss..sss..." And I would pronounce $5 as something like "sssfive".
This of course is all very reminiscent of Al's penchant for putting "etc." in speech bubbles, as though the person is actually saying "et cetera". Scaduto seems to be in the minority among cartoonists -- my impression is that most of them interpret speech bubbles in a more literalistic way.
I just gotta add: it really does depend on the dishwasher. I discovered the hard way that — unless we wanted to clean dried food crud off our just-washed dishes — we had to rinse. Then again, the dishwasher in our apartment is craptacularly bad — if I could replace it, I would. It's been my experience that most dishwashers will chew up detritus just fine.
I think "detritus-chewing drain" was my own linguistic invention, not a phrase taken directly from the dishwasher's manual (although "high temperature scrub" and "sanitizing rinse" were). But the dishwasher does indeed have a spinning, toothed mechanism at the drain that will crunch up any food before it's flushed down the pipe.
The point of the idea is, obviously, that if you pay extra for a good dishwasher, you should let it do the work it's designed for. Yes, we rinsed off the plates before, when we had a crappy one, but I might as well have replaced it with the same cheaper model if the wifey's still going to continue to give the appliance an unfair advantage by putting only pre-treated dinnerware in the blasted thing!
Consumer Reports, by the way, agrees with me. According to them, most dishwashers sold in the US now are good enough that noone should need to pre-rinse their plates.
I just realized that at least one dishwasher I've come into contact with must also be detritus chewing; that would explain the crunching noises. Cool!
We have a crap-tacular dishwasher. It's not the one that came with the house, that one died. But we couldn't afford a new, fancy one, so almost everything must be scrubbed clean unless you want it to go through twice.
Peanut butter is the worst offender, for some reason. *scrubs knife* Come on, get clean!
Dishwasher bitch - we have plastic straws, and those bastards fall through the holes in the utensil basket way too much, making it impossible to pull out the bottom tray casually. And may I say, I don't use the things.
I sent something in, but it didn't have enough words, probably. I just picked the most cliched thing I could think of - Mr X wants better schools, but balks at the thought of raising taxes or volunteering at his kid's school.
No Y-Y-Y-eahs, R-Right, the urge to school him to the moon, so it won't get published.
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