Headline: Dog owner performs near self-amputation in Cascade bin
Live with any breed of dog long enough and you’ll realize how quick a study dog can be when it comes to learning your vulnerabilities. Personally, the sorry look on a dog’s face when it’s time to feed (which gets worse when dinner time is late) is mine. Mind you, on some level I know very well that many of these pitiful expressions are acting at their fullest. I know because I’ve caught my dogs practicing pitifully long faces in front of the mirror and at each other. They think I don’t know this.
Still, even I can appreciate real hunger, and when dinner is long delayed due to a traffic or office jam, I feel bad. On this occasion, I was a good couple of hours late for dinner and hurried out the door to collect the bowls of food; That’s when I realized there wasn’t a clean one in the house. The dishwasher was full of dirty dishes, including all the dog bowls, and not only was I left with every last drop of dishwasher detergent, I didn’t have any type of dish soap. I did what I have to do.
As much as I love to use liquid detergent in my dishwasher, it’s hard to get every last drop out of a huge Costco-sized plastic container big enough to hold fuel for a backhoe. Still, I had convinced myself that there SHOULD be enough left for one more charge. It was night, now, and my dogs’ stomach rumblings were audible, surgery was performed in a Cascade dumpster to remove the last remains.
My dogs are normally impatient to eat, but they watched with great attention when I approached the huge green Cascade container with a small serrated knife. Watching his owner cut off his own limb, now this was entertaining. And finally I competed with his logic. This tiny knife was not up to the challenge and was quickly discarded in favor of a large chef’s knife. And I say BIG. Even the dogs couldn’t see this attempt: paws flew over the eyes as the knife began to wobble against the hard skin of the plastic container. This wasn’t going to work either, and I scanned the kitchen. A screwdriver did not penetrate the bottle. Not even an ice pick. And for future reference, ice picks, when they miss their mark, embed themselves surprisingly deep into Formica. Clearly, the instrument he would need would not be found in a kitchen.
I briefly considered an acetylene torch which would certainly have been overkill. But have you ever wanted to set fire to something that was frustrating you? The wire cutters finally did the trick, but it took me twenty minutes of wrestling with the holding bottle before I found an entry point. In the end, the floor, countertops, my hair, dog hair, and walls were all splattered with blue grime from the dishwasher, but I had done it. Using a spatula to get the sticky stuff out of the inside of the bottle, there WAS enough for one more load. What a waste, I thought. All the dishwasher detergent that we throw away every day because of a presumably empty bottle.
Sharing this story, unbelieving friends have asked why I didn’t just put water in the bottle, shake it up, and empty it into the dishwasher. That’s like asking the average man why he didn’t ask for directions before he found himself 42 miles away from where he needed to go. But honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe my herculean effort to get enough soap out for ONE MORE load of dishes was my version of the guy who doesn’t read or ask for directions.
Finally, my dogs were fed and I learned that for the person who wants to get every last bit of dishwasher detergent, it’s better to use powder.