For years, we struggled with the dishes. We cook, we eat, and there are dishes. We are busy, and we have kids. A plate goes into the sink, then a cup, then a pan. Soon there is a mountain that has to be rinsed before anything can even go into the dishwasher. The dishwasher does the washing. Later, somebody still has to unload it and put everything away. This sounds easy enough. Something in our version of it was broken.
Then the dishwasher went down. I pulled it out and worked on installing a replacement, but the replacement had problems of its own. It kept showing an error. I kept thinking, I got to get to this. I got to fix this. I got to figure it out. A day went by. Then days. The dishes piled up sky high while I waited to restore the machine that was supposed to make the dishes manageable.
I am no stranger to washing dishes by hand. There have been times in my life when I worked as a dishwasher, and I don’t not enjoy washing dishes. I do. Still, the sight of the whole job could overwhelm me. The pile became one enormous task, and the fact that I could not finish all of it made starting any of it harder.
I had been thinking about this same problem in my software-development work: how to make a complicated thing small enough to move. One line came to me in the kitchen. “How do you eat a slice of pizza? One slice at a time.” It is a strange thing to say about a food that already arrives in slices. It was also exactly useful enough.
I stopped treating the dishes as one job. I washed a little bit here and a little bit there. Maybe I did dishes two or three times a day. I added small drying racks and stacked things vertically. When one batch dried, I put it away and made room for the next one. I tried not to beat myself up for leaving part of the mountain for later. The pile began to lose its authority.
Then some strange things started to happen.
I began making breakfast for the kids. Part of my motivation was practical: I wanted them to eat at the counter instead of somewhere else in the house, where we would later have to find and collect the dishes. But once they were sitting there, the little system began to improve. I put down placemats. Soon I was folding napkins and setting out silverware like a restaurant, with a cup for water and maybe another for juice.
The breakfasts improved too. Eggs with toast and fruit. Cereal, waffles, pancakes. Lately I have been frying tortilla shells and scrambling eggs with cilantro and cheese, then adding salsa and sour cream. The shells are lightly salty, chewy and crunchy at the same time. They are very good. The kids really like them.
Now I stand in the kitchen across the counter from them—at the peninsula, to be precise. They each have a placemat. They each have a place. And I have a place too.
That was the part I had not designed for. They come down from their rooms and ask if I can make them breakfast. I do, of course. I stand there and spend that time with them every day. The arrangement solved the problem of dishes wandering through the house, but it also gathered us into the same small patch of morning. A system that began with plates and cups became a routine in which we can count on finding one another.
When they finish, their dishes are within arm’s length. I can take a plate, rinse it in the sink and wash it on the spot. My goal now is to wash the dishes at the end of the meal. I am constantly cleaning up the kitchen in these small passes, and for several weeks the dishes have not piled up.
That is when the larger thought arrived: maybe I had never earned the automation.
“Earned” is a dangerous word if it means that convenience belongs only to people who have suffered through enough manual labor. That is not what I mean. I mean I had asked the dishwasher to solve a process I did not yet understand. It could spray hot water over the plates. It could not decide where we ate, bring the dishes within reach, make the batches manageable, tell me when to put things away or keep me from punishing myself when the whole job was not finished. When it broke, all of those unanswered decisions were waiting in the sink.
Automation promises the button: more time, more efficiency, better results, more and more and more. The promise is real when the button belongs to a process that works. When it does not, automation can hide the break until the machine stops and the mountain reappears.
I still want a working dishwasher. I am not making a case for hand-washing every plate forever. I want to know what job I am giving the machine, what remains mine, and what I would do if the machine disappeared tomorrow. Maybe that is what earning automation means: learning the shape of the work before asking a tool to carry it.
The most valuable part of that knowledge may have little to do with the dishes. The system now has tacos in it. It has lightly salty shells, folded napkins and a place for each of us at the counter. If the dishwasher starts working perfectly tomorrow, I do not want the old process back. The dishwasher was efficient at washing dishes. Our new routine has breakfast in the morning.