Breaking the code

Hard as it is to believe, there are actually many skills and talents I simply don’t have, or have been unable to master.

I can’t juggle.

I dance like everyone’s looking.

My artistic abilities are limited to drawing crooked straight lines.

I play the guitar badly, but at least it’s only three chords.

And when I sing, the dogs howl (in pain) at the moon.

But for all those things I can’t do, I can do one thing better than just about anyone you know: load a dishwasher.

In what can only be described as a freakishly Rain Man-esque talent, I can pack more into a dishwasher than you or my family would think possible. When someone else tries their dishpan hands at it, there’s usually still a pile of dirty dishes left in our fabulous, deep farmer sink we installed during the year of the remodel. I think because the sink is so deep, people who shall not be named feel it’s okay to leave a lot of dishes in there because at a casual glance, they’re out of view.

Anyway, then I have to go to the kitchen, rearrange the dishes in the dishwasher and fill up all that newfound space with the dishes in the sink.

The other skill I have is I know when dishes in the washer are dirty and when they’re clean. Apparently other members of my household do not possess the laser focus and McGyver-like resourcefulness that would let them suss that out.

After all, it would involve opening the dishwasher door and looking in. What are we, detectives?

So my son, in between his Hollywood moving and shaking, and wheelin’ and dealin’, came up with a code. It involves a magnet, with a design by Mike Mitchell (also a Mondo artist), that used to be on the trunk lid of his car before he sold it to Carmax.

The hand magnet takes its place of honor along with my Springsteen On Broadway magnet, and my wife's "I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." magnet.

The code is elegant in its simplicity: thumbs up for clean dishes, thumbs down for dirty dishes. And so far it's working like a charm.

The problem still remains that, for some reason, because I have this gift everyone expects me to do my precision loading of the dishwasher every night—even if I didn't participate in any way in dirtying the dishes. So I've developed a simple, easy to understand code of my own to let them know when I will and won't be their nightly clean up crew.

All I need to use it is a magnet with a different finger.