There is a correct way to load a dishwasher. There is also, apparently, an infinite number of incorrect ways, and I have seen most of them. I have seen things that cannot be unseen. I have opened a dishwasher in a house I will not name and stood there for a full ten seconds, in silence, recalibrating my opinion of the occupants.

The occupants, I should note, seemed perfectly nice. Educated. The kind of people who have a good olive oil and know which way to pass the port. And yet.

The dishwasher does not lie. It simply holds what it is given and presents the evidence without comment or editorial, which is more than I can say for myself, as regular readers will have gathered.

What follows is a typology. Not of bad people, I want to be clear about that. Of people who have, in one specific and entirely avoidable area of domestic life, made choices. You might call them bad choices. Choices that tell us things. Choices that, once seen, reorganise everything you thought you knew about someone's standards.

We begin, as one must, with the glasses.

The glasses go on the top rack. This is not a preference. It is not a lifestyle choice or a difference of opinion to be respectfully navigated. It is a structural fact about water pressure, about glass integrity, about the kind of household you run and what that says about you.

Bottom rack glasses are the dishwasher equivalent of a visible bra strap at a funeral. Technically, it happens, we just don't need to be confronted with it.

Facing down.

Always facing down.

A bowl facing upward will collect water in its base and emerge from the cycle damp, defeated, and slightly resentful, not unlike someone who has been to a work awayday. The bowl did not ask to retain water. We did that. We made that choice, and then we acted surprised.

It is in the dishwasher.

I have seen it. I have documented it. I have, on one occasion, removed it without comment and placed it on the draining board where it belongs, and said nothing, because I am evolved.

The wooden spoon absorbs water. It warps. It splits along the grain. It ends its days looking like something retrieved from an archaeological dig rather than a kitchen drawer. You will not want to use it to make mashed potatoes.

As you throw it in the bin, you will vaguely wonder why, unlike your grandmother’s, your spoon did not last. You may even mutter something like ‘they don’t make them like they used to.”

But they did and do. A wooden spoon is a wooden spoon. Physics didn’t change, your ability to think logically did.

Here is where character is truly revealed.

Knives pointing upward are an act of optimism bordering on recklessness. Forks mixed with spoons suggest someone who has, at some foundational level, given up. A single teaspoon placed horizontally across the top of the basket — resting, not loaded, simply resting — is a personality I could describe at length but will not. Not in this post, at least.

The correct approach is:

This is not complicated. It is, however, apparently rare.Every household has one.

The Reloader does not announce themselves. They wait. They lurk. They bide their time until the other person has left the room, or gone to bed, or popped out for milk, and then they quietly open the dishwasher and correct the geometry. Bowls turned over. Glasses relocated. The wooden spoon removed, cleaned and placed, without ceremony, in the drawer.

The Reloader does not raise it as a conversation because the Reloader has made a calculation: That the peace of not having the conversation is worth slightly more than the satisfaction of having it.

I am the Reloader.

I have always been the Reloader.

This is, I recognise, its own kind of problem.

Here is the thing nobody says out loud: The dishwasher is a performance. Not the cleaning — that part is just physics. The loading. The way we load the dishwasher is a quiet statement about the kind of household we believe we are running, and more specifically, the kind of person we believe ourselves to be.

And people fall, broadly, into types.

That person has standards, a certain amount of unresolved feelings about those standards, and, as it happens, a newsletter.

Hello.

The dishwasher does not judge. It simply reflects.

Which is, now that I think about it, more than most of us manage.