Bobby Brady, eat your heart out

If you ever saw The Brady Bunch episode where Bobby tries to do his own laundry and puts too much detergent into the washing machine and bubbles overflow over the whole room, well, I just lived Bobby's nightmare except I did it with my dishwasher. 

I had just bought Seventh Generation dishwashing soap (I do live in Cambridge after all!) and so squeezed some of its clear liquid into the dishwasher's little receptacle. I did think, "Odd. I thought the liquid was cloudy not clear, but hey, perhaps they’ve changed the formula."

On went the machine. Within minutes, from a crack in the rubber seal around the door out came the sudsy bubbles, spreading like a slow disease over the floor.  Quick, get the mop!

I swung briskly into action, grabbed the handle and massaging it back and forth dragged the mop head across the gray tile. I stopped the machine and opened it up so that I could scoop out some of the bubbles. I restarted the machine, but again out came more bubbles. I stopped the machine again. More mopping. More scooping. I poured cold water into it in the belief that cold water breaks down soapy water more effectively than hot. 

Machine back on. But out come the bubbles again, this time flowing across the slate with an even greater ease, more diluted by the water.  Again and again this repeated.

For the past two hours, I’ve been mopping and wiping, wiping and mopping. When there was a brief pause in the bubble mania, I took the opportunity to mop the bathroom floor too.

Not quite as dramatic as the Brady Bunch, but still a white frothy mess!

In the middle of all of this, I emailed the company to express my rage at their incompetence, with this subject line “Dishwashing liquid = terrible.” It was just then that it occurred to me, maybe this wasn’t dishwasher machine soap after all. Maybe it was dish soap for the sink.  I grabbed the container and scoured the label intently. Sure enough in small but distinctly unmistakable capital letters it read “NOT FOR USE IN AUTOMATIC DISH WASHERS.”

Yeah, they didn't hide the message, that's for sure

Sometimes a bad television show comes up with a gag so stupid you assume it could never happen in real life. And then it happens in real life, and you realize, the writers got their idea from somewhere.

It was all very humorous in that way that very annoying things can be very humorous in very annoying ways.