This is the working title of my first book.  A book, mind you, that will never be written, but I am confident that if it were, it would do moderately well in the marketplace.

In my ever increasing years on the planet, I've come to the startling realizing that there are three types of people in our culture: those who prefer to load the dishwasher, those who prefer to unload it, and that rather eccentric group that has no preference one way or the other. 

This final category can be subdivided into three sections: those who truly have no preference; those, who for lack of access to a dishwasher, have never had the opportunity to learn their preference; and those who have never washed a dish.  (For the latter, their dishwasher of choice typically has two hands and answers to either 'Mom' or 'Honey'.)

I am clearly an unloader.  As an unloader, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that some people actually prefer to have contact with the dirty dishes.  I have visions of that bowl of leftover refried beans that got shoved to the back of the refrigerator and emerged a month later.  Or that cup of rich, chocolaty Ovaltine that sat on the bookshelf for two days before it was discovered and brought to the sink.  (If you've never seen 2 day old Ovaltine, I can assure you, one experience with this bright blue curd you couldn't cut with a butter knife, and you will never buy Ovaltine again.)  Or the daily experience with the half eaten bowl of breakfast cereal.  You know the one: the little squares have grown to three times their original size, they have sucked up every ounce of liquid and are now wedged in there so tight you have to pry them loose.  These are the trials the unloader would love to avoid. 

The unloader enjoys the squeaky clean feel of the dishes that have been washed, sanitized and dried to perfection.  They enjoy the stacking process as all the bowls and cups and plates fall into their place in line so neatly and rest comfortably in the cupboard. 

Yes, I am certainly biased toward the unloader, but I know that loaders do exist.  I live with one.

Present my husband with an empty dishwasher and there is a fairly good chance he will put a dish in it.  Present him with a dishwasher full of clean dishes and I can guarantee you that the dirty dishes will stack up in the sink until such time as the dishwasher has emptied itself by virtue of demand for its contents.

A loader like my husband finds joy in organizing the dirty dishes in the sink.  He sorts them by type, stacks them by size, puts all the silverware in a glass of water and waits for the dishwasher to become available.  If more dishes arrive, he resorts, restacks and the wait continues.  I have never really experimented with this as I typically unload and reload the dishwasher myself, but I do believe that if left to himself, he would find a way to eliminate unloading altogether.  I envision this cycle of use whereby there would be enough dishes in the house that one could organize and reorganize the dirty ones long enough that every clean dish had been used and the dishwasher would be ready to go again.  The only flaw with this plan is that the dishwasher would never hold all those dishes.

On that rare occasion when my husband does unload the dishwasher, he does simply that.  He stacks all the clean dishes on the counter, ready for someone else to put away.  Creating this third step in the process seems extremely inefficient to me.  How much harder is it to go the extra two feet to the cupboard?  But to a loader, it is obviously hard enough.

I am certain that one could attach deep meaning to the preference either to load or unload and an equally deep meaning to having no preference at all.  While any deep meaning attached would probably qualify as a load in itself, there are those who would latch onto it and consider it a science. 

Along that vein, I'm taking a poll.  Why not give a minute of your time for the greater good of advancing science. (See sidebar). 

To be continued...