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Thursday, May 5, 2011

INTERNET COMMERCE

INTERNET COMMERCE

So the doohickey that I clean the dirty dinner plates with is apparently known as a dish mop. It looks a little like Phyllis Diller, only it's funnier. In our household, the wife cooks splendid meals every night, and the husband eats them, usually while yelling at the Yankees, an untidy combination. When I lift up the plate after dinner, there is a ring of salt and pepper that looks like a lunar eclipse. There are remains of a carcass (a zebra?) littering the table, and a brown-looking sauce that may have been once been red. Afterward the dishes go in the dishwasher, and the pots and pans fall under my jurisdiction. Lately my dish mop is resembling one of those over-zealous reporters who is too stupid to come in out of a hurricane. All the mop hairs are on one side, and only half of the pots and pans are clean.

My wife tried to get a new one at the supermarket, and there were none to be found. It's possible that there are politics involved, and somebody is not greasing the palms of our district's dish mop sales reps. We have run into this before with Cocoa Krispies. No one will stock them anymore- they are toast. Luckily we can still find bread, or bread would be toast. We looked at the hardware store, the drugstore, even the deli, no luck. Dish mops are just not in style anymore, possibly because people now do all their dish mopping online.

Which gave us the idea to look online for a dish mop. I told her to look for a "Dishmop Town," "Dishmop City," or any dishmop municipality. "DishMopsRUs.com." or a "Just Dishmops," or even "Just Dishmops, Too." We finally turned to Amazon. Yes, they had dish mops, but only in bulk. You had to buy 600 dish mops, at a total cost of $3,000. We kept looking, and eventually found one for sale, for $5.99. It was no Phyllis Diller. More like a Janeane Garofalo, not even in her prime, or a Moms Mabley. But we bought it, and with tax, shipping and handling, came to $19.29. We also got an extended warranty for $25.00, should anything go wrong within the first year. It should be here in a couple weeks, and by then I will have a lot of dirty dishes to clean.

There used to be a thing called the "Fuller Brush Man." It was a salesman who came door-to-door to sell cleaning products to a wife whose husband was not home at the time. The husband, as the theory goes, would return to find the house clean, and the wife would have a few new uses for brushes that would make your head spin. I mention this only because I would bet anything that the salesman would have had a dish mop in his sample case. But someone figured out that they had brushes at the store, and that was the end of the Fuller Brush Man.

Every time I turn around there is a new television ad for an innovative plug-in device that makes your house smell of something different than whatever it smelled like before. Now there is a motion-activated stink-swapping device that springs into action whenever you pass by, and releases a little volcano plume of potpourri into the air. I thought to myself that if the people in that commercial only had a dish mop, their house probably wouldn't smell so disgusting.

So I go on, making do with a pot scrubber, or playing dishwasher roulette, where I guess if an eating receptacle is dishwasher-safe. If I remove it after the dry cycle and it looks like it's from a Dali painting, I lose.

ps: The thing finally arrived, and because there was nothing else in the website photo to compare it to, we couldn't have known that it was only four inches long. Any five inch pots will have to fend for themselves. In all fairness, Phyllis Diller is also much shorter in person.


Incidentally, even though Alfred Fuller died in 1973, the Fuller Brush Company remains the largest employer in Barton County, Kansas. When we were young children our mother used to smack us on the behind with a hairbrush when we misbehaved, approximately 20 hours out of the day. As far as I know, the hairbrush was never used on hair, and photos of me during those years confirm this.

1 comment:

  1. AN answer to your dish dilemma. Seek and find a restaurant supply store. They stock every kitchen item you have ever seen or heard of and many no one knows of; excepting the iron chef types. I even purchased my own case of lil' brown packets of Sugar in the Raw. And no- that is not a porn movie. Or maybe it is.

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