Dishwasher dreams and multifunction foolery!

I’m ashamed of myself. I’ve willingly and knowingly embraced consumerism as a hungry dog facing a bowl of food.

For the first time in my life my home has a dishwasher. Have to say I wasn’t terribly excited by the prospect, because most of the time, it’s just easier to do the dishes by hand. Incredibly tedious sometimes, but fast and efficient. But when we have guests, or on my day off, I’ll sometimes just fill the machine and let it do its stuff.

Eeezy peezy lemon squeezy, you’d think, until Adley gets carried away with the purchasing of cleaning tablets for the bloomin’ thing.

When we first moved in I bought a pack of 30 Finish Powerball tablets, which lasted over a year. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the Finish Powerballs were on offer at half price in the supermarket, so I bought a pack of 39, knowing that they’d last for ages.

Saturday is my day off from doing dishes, so last week I opened my new pack of dishwasher tablets to discover that each was wrapped in plastic paper.

Being a simple rather slow soul, I was confused.

Doesn’t take much.

Uh-oh, these ‘uns ain’t like those other ones. The front of the box confirmed that I’d purchased Finish ALL-IN-1 Powerballs, which had a heck of a lot of CAPITAL LETTERS all over it, as well as FIZZING ACTION offering a POWERFUL CLEAN due to a NEW FORMULA.

WOW in even more capital letters!! Surely you couldn’t ask any more of a single dishwasher tablet? Thankfully my life so far has been fun and frantic enough to allow me no time to ponder the merits of how much I might expect from a dishwasher tablet.

Looking at the wrapped tablet like one of the monkeys staring at the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I turned it round and round, wondering whether I should take the wrapper off before I put it into the machine. Surely there were instructions on the box?

Yes! Now I was confronted by a wealth of information about how great this tablet was.

“The New Fizzing Powerball releases bubbles that disperse deep cleaning agents to wherever they are needed.”

Blimey! It sounds like the CIA!

“Markowitz and Shepherd – you’re our best deep cleaning agents, so we’re sending you into Syria tomorrow!”

“Sir yes Sir! We go where we are needed, Sir!”

More, they were: “Dual layer tablets with powerful ingredients to lift off tough stains PLUS a rinse action to deliver a great shine.”

Can it get better than this? Yes! Pretty round icons displayed the tablets’ six power actions: “Powerful clean; salt function; rinse aid function; tea-stain removal; grease cutting; machine limescale protection.”

Well that settles that then. Apart from solving the mystery of perpetual motion or coming up with a way to stop Greenland’s ice sheet going into Critical Melt, these little babies did the lot.

But what’s this?

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.