There is a perturbing ignorance in some reactions to Dorset Council rejecting the installation of a free dishwashing machine at Branxholm Recreation Ground.
It isn’t just the councillor who rejected the proposal for a dishwasher at the Branxholm Recreation Ground with the suggestion that a two drawer dishwasher is a superior solution, because they feared events using the facility might have such poor patronage there would be so little to wash up.
There is the supporter of this parsimony online. Someone who believes that manual dishwashing was far superior option for the benefit of the volunteers who do what they don’t. Their suggestion to use red rubber gloves betrays that they are more familiar with industrial protective gear against corrosive chemicals. It seems they imagine a sink charged with caustic dishwashing powder, because their delicate hands have never dipped into a mild detergent solution to wash the dishes protected by the domestic dishwashing glove of a different colour.
It would appear from some comments about the Branxholm Events announcement that Dorset Council and their crony supporters are Luddites tainted with a misogynistic view of the benefits of automation. This genius has denied the government’s grant to the Community Project based on wonder as to why anyone would use an electric iron when you can heat the iron up over an open fire just as easily? Or why anyone needs a remote control when you can just tell the wife to change the TV channel? They probably harbour deep grudges against the international conspiracy of the evil international financiers to remove public phone boxes and force them to buy a mobile phone so that their every fascinating bowel movement could be traced via a poop app.
Such deep analysis of the way things are is reflected in some of their commentary that questions the efficiencies of the modern dishwashing machine.
Over fifty years ago, as a poor student struggling to qualify for a student allowance under the mean Commonwealth scholarship’s mean means test, I was forced to work. Not being able to afford a haircut and other accoutrements to make myself acceptable to obtain a more attractive form of employment, I became a dishwasher. An unmentionable banished to the dark corners at the back of a busy restaurant kitchen.
Even then the economics dictated the benefits of mechanisation. The restaurant kitchen had a machine for me to load and unload and my duties were principally to watch the cockroaches waltz across the shelving as I sweated scrubbing the more difficult items in the sink.
Whilst automatic dishwashers have progressed since then; hot water service has gone backwards. Hot water is now encumbered with mandatory temperature limits to prevent the mentally challenged from remembering what hot water can do.
Education used to distinguish between scalds and burns and how to treat them, but now the water temperature in the sink struggles to be above lukewarm. Even when filled with only hot water. At least domestically. Maybe commercial institutions have some dispensation to achieve the temperature mandated by health authorities. Whatever the temperature I doubt that matters to the children of the dancing cockroaches, the point is that water at a healthy sanitising temperature is largely only available in a dishwasher with a heating element.
So the case for hand washing has become less compelling. As also is the labour-saving suggestion of paper plates and plastic implements. The cost-benefit that justifies this option revolves around avoiding payment to the volunteers, providing a cheap and tacky dining experience and of protecting us all from the malcontent terrorists who use the paper plates as weapons to vandalise the postal boxes of Branxholm.
This allegedly cheaper option can create more work when environmentally minded people treat everything as rubbish and throw the remains anywhere. Then there are sustainability issues. They are not paper plates. Like most pretty papers they are coated with plastic and injected with synthetic dies to accompany the plastic cutlery. So the increase in garbage is polluted, unless you go for more woken organic substitutes which I am sure would generate more woken howls of horror in the comments of the naysayers.
However; we are not talking about those excuses for parsimony, Dorset Council simply rejected the proposal on the grounds that they feared a possibility of potential maintenance of the dishwasher, if the committee should no longer exist, because all of the operational expenses are paid for by the committee.
To a rational person that problem can be easily addressed. Council merely has to disconnect the dishwasher. They don’t even have to take the offensive item to the tip. So what is their problem?
It is the problem of user pays. History has built up a large number of public assets which councils have responsibility for providing for community use. However; squeezed for money, Council wishes to make a profit from these assets rather than maximising community benefits. The subscriptions to an exercise class at the recreation ground mean that Council demands a cut of the supposed profit and has made this community service untenable.
At the moment donation denominated events like the pickleball at Branxholm hall are immune, but the council could decide to feed on this next in their desire to suck the life blood out of the community rather than nurture it.
Meanwhile Council is cheered on by trolls on the internet wearing heavy red rubber gloves as they hammer their outrage into their smart-arsed phone keyboards to get someone to like how clever they are.