I was reading this post of Swistle’s and it (and the comments) got me thinking.

I have never lived in a house (or apartment) without a dishwasher.  I mean, yeah, I lived in the dorm my freshman year of college, but there was a dining hall so it wasn’t like I was doing a lot of cooking.

Other than that, I’ve always had a dishwasher handy.  I wasn’t responsible for doing the dishes when I still lived with my parents – that was always my dad’s responsibility.  Mom cooked, he cleaned up the kitchen (and WOE TO YOU if you stacked dirty plates one on top of the other because then he would have to rinse BOTH SIDES.  But I digress), and therefore Dad was the one who loaded the dishwasher.

The comments in Swistle’s post seem to indicate that a lot of couples fight about proper dishwasher loading, something else that’s a rather foreign concept to me.  Again, probably because I grew up in a house where only ONE person did the loading.

N and I both wash the dishes, but neither of us is particularly anal about the way the dishwasher gets loaded – plus we each have the knack for tetris-ing dishes efficiently.  And we’re both pre-rinsers, so no argument there either.  We don’t tend to load it with pots and pans, or large out-of-the-ordinary dishes unless we plan to run it immediately and there’s leftover room.

So now I’m curious:  Is the dishwasher really a big-ticket issue in some households?  People argue about how it is loaded, or what is loaded in it?  I know there are differences of opinion (the way my father insists on loading the silverware positively IRKS me when I’m back at their house), but I guess since N and I are on the same page it isn’t a big deal for us.

Do you have a dishwasher?  If so, do you pre-rinse or just cram dirty dishes directly in there (like my father-in-law, because it is a dishwasher, after all)?  And am I the only person who would prefer to rinse dishes and load the dishwasher rather than unload it?

(Incidentally, I am quite aware that this may be the most mundane post I’ve ever written.  I was so busy today that at this point my brain cells are all refusing to think straight.  Shut up.)