People Who Don’t (Think About) Clean(ing)
Dec. 30th, 2017 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI’ve been meaning to blog about this for months. Possibly over a year. I still don’t know really what I want to say, so I’ll just sort of write around it and hope that the shaded background will make what I really want to get out sort of pop out by its absence. A silhouette, if you will, if my actual topic.
I have a food processor. I used to have a very small food processor, then I had a small and a large one, and I got rid of the small one. I almost never use the large one. I used to use the small one. The small one was not big enough to do the thing I really wanted a food processor to do (make pie crust, which a stand mixer is bad at for a variety of reasons. I can do it by hand, but it turns out the current optimal solution is to ask R. to do it instead. He doesn’t seem to mind and he enjoys eating the results so it seems only fair). But the small one was easy and quick to clean. The big food processor is able to do what I want to do, but I don’t use it because except when I’m cooking for a really large group of people (larger than I ever cook for these days), it is more trouble to clean it than I gain by using it.
Almost no one ever cleans out the greats trap in the vent hood above the stove (I get that people who have never had a vent hood above the stove will be confused by this. But you know, a lot of other people will be, too).
While most people — once they’ve discovered the failure mode of not doing it — empty the lint tray in the dryer, almost never one pulls the dryer forward, disconnects the hose, and vacuums it out. Which really does need to be done periodically. If you go outside a house or apartment building and find where the dryer vents to the outdoors, you almost always find some lint hanging about in the bushes out there.
I know a couple people who have or had those built-into-the-house vacuum systems (the ducting for one is installed in this house, but we never hooked it up and don’t intend to). One of them still uses hers. The other one tells this hysterical (well, it is funny NOW, at least the way she tells the story) story about vacuuming up something that was on fire. The vacuum did not magically put the fire out. Instead, it moved it to a very inaccessible location in the house. It turned out okay, but was very scary for a while.
OK, one more. I was cleaning the shower earlier this year, and got really annoyed when I realized the caulking needed to be redone in the acrylic surround (three pieces, I think, maybe more, so this was where the pan connected to the walls). I wound up hiring someone to rip the whole thing out and install a tile shower. Part of my goal was to get a new shower head with a telephone head. Of course, I could have just swapped out the shower head and R. could have redone the caulk. But there’s this point where, I didn’t love the shower and R. actually disliked it. And don’t get me started on the silicone bead on the glass shower door. Yuck.
I really wanted a shower head because I was sick of filling a bucket to clean the walls of the shower. Yes. Yes I was.
Here’s the thing. There are a ton of places around where you live and/or work where there is persistent yuck. Grunge. Sticky accumulation of let’s not think too hard about what that might be. Dusting is easy. Toilets are really not that hard to clean. But shower stalls? Shower stalls are the worst. And I just don’t understand why. My current theory is that places that are hard to clean occur because the people who make things are not the same people who clean them. If the designers were the cleaners, they’d do things a lot differently. Because they would be like, this sucks, let’s put in a telephone shower head so we can hose it down. Let’s put an attachment on the sink that we can screw a hose onto and attach a spray head to. Etc.
For thousands of years, we were pretty good at ignoring the persistent yuck, because glass hadn’t really happened yet, so there weren’t a lot of windows and thus not a lot of natural light to show us where the yuck was in the corners. But we got glass, we got lots of windows, and worse, we got electric lighting. For a really long time, the people with power in society just basically got to insist on the people without power in society (pick a pair: and you can use slave, serf, etc. literally or metaphorically, and you can find a time and a place where it was all true) doing the grunge work. Anyone lucky enough to be in a position to do creative design work sure wasn’t someone who was on their hands and knees in the corner with a knife trying to dig whatever the fuck that was out of the corner.
And don’t tell me about Dutch women, or Swedish women, or any other group of Northern women who clean everything, and who have roughly equal positions in their societies and who always had the right to their own money, and who owned property but still cleaned things and blah blah blah. First of all, it isn’t anywhere near that straightforward. And second of all, anyone who has been trapped indoors for 4-6 months out of the year and then gets hit by a ton of sunlight does a lot of crazy shit. Manic, angry, scare everyone out of the house cleaning is the least of it.
I’m not sure what to do about this. But I do think that some version of Eat Your Own Dogfood is probably called for. If you are unfamiliar with this term, here, I have found it in wikipedia for you:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
We’re running out of continents full of desperate people who want to move to the United States and clean houses and pick fruit and work in slaughterhouses and wipe noses and butts so their kids can attend school here and grow up prosperous and, hopefully, safe from gangs and civil war and the like. Sure, we can build robots like Roomba. But robots like Roomba have severe limitations. Just like dishwashers. If we are going to have meaningful home automation, erasing gendered division of labor is going to be an important part of getting there. Not so everyone has to do their own chores to build character and garbage explanations of that sort.
So the designers of the future will build stuff that isn’t such a pain to clean that we ultimately refuse to keep using it.
ETA:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3020214/lay-back-and-clean-your-house-with-swarming-micro-robot-cleaners
I know this is pie-in-the-sky brainstorm stuff. But bear with me. Did anyone ask what was involved in cleaning out the bees? I mean, they go out, they pee on things and then they drink up the pee + grunge. It’s gotta come out of the bees at some point, right? Or do you just _throw the robot bees away_?
I know, I know. You’re like, why do you even care? Well, here’s why I care. There are people out there who _reuse paper towel_ and advocate that other people should, too. There are lifecycle studies of the tradeoff between all kinds of disposable vs. reusable and how many times you need to reuse it things. You are going to be expected to clean the damn bees. How hard is it going to, er, be?
I have a food processor. I used to have a very small food processor, then I had a small and a large one, and I got rid of the small one. I almost never use the large one. I used to use the small one. The small one was not big enough to do the thing I really wanted a food processor to do (make pie crust, which a stand mixer is bad at for a variety of reasons. I can do it by hand, but it turns out the current optimal solution is to ask R. to do it instead. He doesn’t seem to mind and he enjoys eating the results so it seems only fair). But the small one was easy and quick to clean. The big food processor is able to do what I want to do, but I don’t use it because except when I’m cooking for a really large group of people (larger than I ever cook for these days), it is more trouble to clean it than I gain by using it.
Almost no one ever cleans out the greats trap in the vent hood above the stove (I get that people who have never had a vent hood above the stove will be confused by this. But you know, a lot of other people will be, too).
While most people — once they’ve discovered the failure mode of not doing it — empty the lint tray in the dryer, almost never one pulls the dryer forward, disconnects the hose, and vacuums it out. Which really does need to be done periodically. If you go outside a house or apartment building and find where the dryer vents to the outdoors, you almost always find some lint hanging about in the bushes out there.
I know a couple people who have or had those built-into-the-house vacuum systems (the ducting for one is installed in this house, but we never hooked it up and don’t intend to). One of them still uses hers. The other one tells this hysterical (well, it is funny NOW, at least the way she tells the story) story about vacuuming up something that was on fire. The vacuum did not magically put the fire out. Instead, it moved it to a very inaccessible location in the house. It turned out okay, but was very scary for a while.
OK, one more. I was cleaning the shower earlier this year, and got really annoyed when I realized the caulking needed to be redone in the acrylic surround (three pieces, I think, maybe more, so this was where the pan connected to the walls). I wound up hiring someone to rip the whole thing out and install a tile shower. Part of my goal was to get a new shower head with a telephone head. Of course, I could have just swapped out the shower head and R. could have redone the caulk. But there’s this point where, I didn’t love the shower and R. actually disliked it. And don’t get me started on the silicone bead on the glass shower door. Yuck.
I really wanted a shower head because I was sick of filling a bucket to clean the walls of the shower. Yes. Yes I was.
Here’s the thing. There are a ton of places around where you live and/or work where there is persistent yuck. Grunge. Sticky accumulation of let’s not think too hard about what that might be. Dusting is easy. Toilets are really not that hard to clean. But shower stalls? Shower stalls are the worst. And I just don’t understand why. My current theory is that places that are hard to clean occur because the people who make things are not the same people who clean them. If the designers were the cleaners, they’d do things a lot differently. Because they would be like, this sucks, let’s put in a telephone shower head so we can hose it down. Let’s put an attachment on the sink that we can screw a hose onto and attach a spray head to. Etc.
For thousands of years, we were pretty good at ignoring the persistent yuck, because glass hadn’t really happened yet, so there weren’t a lot of windows and thus not a lot of natural light to show us where the yuck was in the corners. But we got glass, we got lots of windows, and worse, we got electric lighting. For a really long time, the people with power in society just basically got to insist on the people without power in society (pick a pair: and you can use slave, serf, etc. literally or metaphorically, and you can find a time and a place where it was all true) doing the grunge work. Anyone lucky enough to be in a position to do creative design work sure wasn’t someone who was on their hands and knees in the corner with a knife trying to dig whatever the fuck that was out of the corner.
And don’t tell me about Dutch women, or Swedish women, or any other group of Northern women who clean everything, and who have roughly equal positions in their societies and who always had the right to their own money, and who owned property but still cleaned things and blah blah blah. First of all, it isn’t anywhere near that straightforward. And second of all, anyone who has been trapped indoors for 4-6 months out of the year and then gets hit by a ton of sunlight does a lot of crazy shit. Manic, angry, scare everyone out of the house cleaning is the least of it.
I’m not sure what to do about this. But I do think that some version of Eat Your Own Dogfood is probably called for. If you are unfamiliar with this term, here, I have found it in wikipedia for you:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
We’re running out of continents full of desperate people who want to move to the United States and clean houses and pick fruit and work in slaughterhouses and wipe noses and butts so their kids can attend school here and grow up prosperous and, hopefully, safe from gangs and civil war and the like. Sure, we can build robots like Roomba. But robots like Roomba have severe limitations. Just like dishwashers. If we are going to have meaningful home automation, erasing gendered division of labor is going to be an important part of getting there. Not so everyone has to do their own chores to build character and garbage explanations of that sort.
So the designers of the future will build stuff that isn’t such a pain to clean that we ultimately refuse to keep using it.
ETA:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3020214/lay-back-and-clean-your-house-with-swarming-micro-robot-cleaners
I know this is pie-in-the-sky brainstorm stuff. But bear with me. Did anyone ask what was involved in cleaning out the bees? I mean, they go out, they pee on things and then they drink up the pee + grunge. It’s gotta come out of the bees at some point, right? Or do you just _throw the robot bees away_?
I know, I know. You’re like, why do you even care? Well, here’s why I care. There are people out there who _reuse paper towel_ and advocate that other people should, too. There are lifecycle studies of the tradeoff between all kinds of disposable vs. reusable and how many times you need to reuse it things. You are going to be expected to clean the damn bees. How hard is it going to, er, be?