Edit: LOL love the responses. You ain’t wrong…
Edit2: I posted this for giggles and have enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for the “parenting advice” (rolls eyes). My daughter is a shit show, but I wouldn’t trade her in for anything. She has three daughters, one of which is exactly like her and the two others are not. So…
It’s your fault, accept the shame and teach her.
I wouldn’t put it that bluntly… but yeah. OP you can’t shame your child for not knowing something you should have taught her. Teach her, kindly, explaining why things are done a specific way.
Kindly.
My daughter is not an adult, she’s a teenager. But it’s her job to put away the dishes. And no matter what I do, she can’t understand that, in the silverware drawer, THE BIG SPOONS GO IN THE BIG SPOON SLOT AND THE LITTLE SPOONS GO IN THE LITTLE SPOON SLOT!
And she thinks this is acceptable.
I understand the compulsion to disown.
My husband is 30 and can’t understand this. And not every pot is meant to be stored in one, large, precariously balanced stack. There’s a whole cabinet there. You can spread them out…
Meanwhile in our house, every pot needs to be precariously balanced in a stack in order to fit in the cupboard.
How precarious? This will blow your mind!
We have 3 pots/pans, A big one, a medium one, and a little one.
Now, and bear with me because I know this is an unorthodox way to stack things, but I think the little pan should go inside the medium pan, and those two should go inside the big pan. It’s crazy, but it just might work.
My partner has other ideas when he stacks them though.
She loaded it, but poorly. Which is a vast improvement on my wifes not loading it at all.
At least you have multiple wifes
Believe it or not its the opposite for me. I help take care of my elderly parents keep them independent and they both do this. I am compelled to physically take dishes out and rearrange them to reclaim like a second loads worth of wasted space. Some days I’m also tempted to disown them!
She’s from group B. Group A loads correctly. Group B does this stuff on purpose so we in group A will just stop letting them screw this up and they no longer have to load it.
There’s also group C which I was part of, you just say that you just pooped or scratch your butt whenever they ask you to load/unload and they’ll immediately offer to do that for you instead.
These are the kinds of people who go on the Internet and claim that dishwashers don’t work very well.
When I was 23 I moved into a sharehouse that had a dishwasher, I lived there over a year before I saw it, it had a false cabinet so it blended in. I’d always just washed my dishes in the sink and I keep all my dishes, cutlery and pans separate in a tub in the pantry because I have allergies. I’d never used a dishwasher before.
I googled how to use a dishwasher because I didn’t want to be the 20 year old that can’t do basic chores. I read the user manual and looked for the filters and catchment drains. They were filthy so I cleaned them, then followed the stacking guide in the user manual and ran it with a full load of my housemates dishes.
I was very impressed with how clean they came out.
I mentioned it to a housemate who found it very amusing I’d only just discovered the dishwasher, he warned me that it was old and broken and not a very good dishwasher so the few housemates that use it were actually talking about splitting the cost of a replacement if I wanted to get in on it.
Why? When the dishwasher was working perfectly.
All 7 of my housemates flooded into the kitchen to assess the cleanliness of the dishes because no one believed me that the dishwasher worked.
Turns out in the 7 years the house had been used for student housing since the landlords son took over as head tenant, not a single one of the rotating cast of 8 housemates had ever cleaned the secondary catchment filter, and only rarely did someone remember to clean the main filter.
Turns out the dishwasher works great when you remove the months worth of old rotten corn building up in the filter, and drain off the 7 years of muck that’s blocking the greywater outlet flow.
My housemates will still say I stack the dishwasher like a sociopath, but I learned from the user manual so I don’t care, the dishes are clean.
- Thank your daughter for helping you with chores.
- Bring her to the mess and let her see it for herself.
- Kindly ask her why she thinks it turned out that way.
- Ask her what she thinks she can do avoid this kind of thing next time. (This is your opportunity to explain to her how to do things.)
- Kindly ask her to do it again, correctly. (Consider doing it together)
- Tell her she’s awesome for helping out, and that you really appreciate it.
Never be angry. Be patient and supportive. Don’t let frustration escalate.
For an adult? Nah. You can certainly kindly let them know that this isn’t really gonna work and explain why (and let them know you appreciate the effort), but the rest of it is way overkill and could easily be seen as patronizing, imo. They’re an adult, not a 13 year old.
Also, I interpreted the OP as finding it humorously absurd (which it is) rather than being frustrated or anything.
They’re an adult, not a 13 year old.
As the parent of a 13-year-old, that wouldn’t work either. They’d just pout and tell you that you think they can’t do anything right.
Not that getting angry helps, that makes it worse. Bargaining can work though. Promising bubble tea from a local cafe if they do it right goes a long way toward committing a teenager to education.
This method of bribery also works on supreme court judges.