One of the most disgusting habits I know is this propensity certain people have to place dirty dishes in the sink and fill them with water.

What's up with that? *Shudder.*

Of course, if you're going to do the dishes by hand, this makes complete sense: the water stops the food from drying on, and making it harder to remove when the (manual) scrubbing begins. And you're going to eventually fill the sink with water anyway.

But we live in an age of dishwashers. We have one at work, for example. When I go to do the dishes, I often find a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, placed there and filled with utterly disgusting water by my co-workers -- a number of whom apparently consider emptying the dishwasher to be beneath their royal station.

I'm not really that neat or picky. I simply hate, when I'm loading the dishwasher, having to dunk my hands into dishes filled with food-saturated water in order to retrieve a (barely-dirty! tea-stirring!) spoon someone has submerged there. And the disgusting mess each non-dishwasher-emptier contributes invariably makes it less likely that others will be willing to tackle the situation.

I do understand that these technology experts (generally a rather "progressive" bunch: about 30% of them -- I am not joking or exaggerating -- will be delegates at the DNC convention this summer) have serious trouble adapting to this fancy new "electric dishwasher" technology -- which has only become popular comparatively recently (in, oh, the last 40 years or so; before they were born, in other words).

Thus they seem completely unaware that the dish they fill to the brim with water will soon be (and would otherwise have been immediately) placed in the dishwasher -- a dry space -- where it will remain for hours or days until the next load is run. So what is the food-enriched water accomplishing? It only makes the job that much more disgusting for their inferiors (such as myself) who deign to occasionally soil our hands with their shunned manual labor.

Oh, and it wastes time, too. (The best of both worlds!)

(And it's even funnier when the water-filled dish is a dirty water or soda glass. Yes, that last filling of water really stops the old, leftover *water* from drying on and making a mess!)

I have numerous friends who've had this same habit, including one roommate, who was otherwise immaculately neat. (The dishwasher would sit empty; next to it would be a huge stack of dishes, sloshing with molding water.) Attempts to modify this behavior proved utterly useless: reason, re-enforcement, and even placing a sign over the sink didn't help. I have a lovely photo of my sink with a sign that says: "Please place dirty dishes in the dishwasher" over it -- and a huge stack of dirty, water-filled dishes beneath it which almost attains the height of the sign! (And yes, the dishwasher was empty at the time.)

This, and similar experiences, lead me to believe most people have almost no control over (or apply almost no thought to) most their daily choices and actions.

I can understand that it's hard to change certain things: a fear of spiders or heights; startling at a loud noise; giving into cravings. I can also understand that people put off doing additional work (like leaving a coat or shirt on a chair instead of hanging it up -- guilty!). But something like filling a dish with water and stacking it in the sink would seem to be a complex, high level, conscious behavior -- hardly reflexive at all. It's a bit like arguing you just can't remember to stop reflexively knitting hats.

But it would seem to be so.