Knife/Glass

I once used a knife in the apartment that Robot and I shared back in the day and apologized to him--I hadn't washed dishes in weeks.

He said, "I don't care. What could be easier washing than a knife?".

I don't remember my response, although I think it may have been less incredulous than warranted because of self-interest. But I've been thinking about this for a few years now and I disagree completely.

The virtue of a knife is its cutting edge, not its sides, and nothing is harder to clean. When you clean it, you have to negotiate the Scylla/Charybdis (is this meme old?) of squeezing the sponge too hard and cutting it, or not actually getting the knife clean. This problem is amplified by the fact that you can't really examine this essential part of the object you're cleaning: hopefully, if you've got a good knife, it's very hard to see.

So the truth is that a glass is easier to clean because you can find the biofilm disgustingness that lies upon it by examining it from the exterior. I now wonder how many of the number of times I was sick while I was living with Robot were caused by his inept cleaning of knives.

Generation PWN

While a coworker and I were discussing the relative merits of the Facebook groups "A grizzly bear would pwn an anaconda in a fight" and "An anaconda would pwn a grizzly bear in a fight," an elderly colleague walked by. I considered, for a second, the possibility that this guy would realize we were not discussing work-related issues and pwn us in front of our boss or something. But this was clearly paranoia: our generation is indecipherable to its own members; I'm sure those on the outside just don't even bother. This guy probably thought we were talking about computer cables ("a series of tubes") or something. What n00bs!