Friday, October 17, 2008

To wash or not to wash

So imagine you find yourself in a community space, say like a work kitchen, that everyone is supposed to take responsibility for. But like many, many volumes of sociological texts that have been written on the subject, you find yourself in a Tragedy of the Commons situation. Particularly when it comes to the dishes.

Let's say you have a system that contains community dishes but every person is responsible for washing the dishes that they use. The office space contains a nice drying rack to aid you in this task. The problem arises when it comes to the responsibility of emptying said drying rack. No one is specifically assigned to it, so no one really does it.

As an individual who has dishes to wash, finding a full drying rack is often annoying. But being the good, community minded individual you are, you take it upon yourself to empty it so you can a) wash your own dishes and b) make room for others.

Enter dilemma. As you are emptying the rack you come across a dish that is not what you would deem clean. This isn't one of those subjective kinds of clean either, it's still got food stuck to it. Granted it's kind of clear, but it is food none the less. And, since you have eaten out for lunch everyday this week, you know that it wasn't yours to begin with.

Do you
A) Rewash said dish
B) Leave in drying rack for someone else to deal with
C) Put away in cupboard, pretending you never saw it

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

B) Leave in drying rack for someone else to deal with.

Robguy said...

I think the way to do it is just have all the dishes on the drying rack. Instead of taking a clean one out of the cupboard, just take it from the rack; it's self recycling.

As for the dirty dish - I'd probably take it out and put it next to the sink in hopes that the piggy would see that they didn't wash properly.