A Typical Conversation Between an Aerospace Engineer and a Chemist...

In a recent phone conversation, my dad recounted to me a chat he had last week with a colleague who is a chemist and has spent considerable time living and working in Europe. After hearing about my German roommates and their dish washing protocol, he mentioned it to the colleague. From what I was told, the following is what occurred:

"So my son is in Latvia on a international internship. Have I mentioned that? Yeah? He's having a great time. He's just such go-getter, you know. Anyways, he has a couple of Germans as roommates and he wrote on his blog - which, reading it, by the way, makes for the best part of my day - about how these guys don't rinse their dishes; they scrub, and immediately put 'em out to dry."

The chemist chuckled. "Yeah, I discovered the same thing when I lived over there. None of my co-workers rinsed their dishes either."

"Really?"

"Nope. No rinsing, whatsoever." He continued to chuckle. "Until one day I sat them down and did some tests with the dishes they had just washed. They saw, how without rinsing, how 'clean' the dishes really got."

His chuckle had turned into a belly laugh by now and he continued, "Sure enough, the lights went on in their heads as they observed all the bacteria and soapy, oily scum left behind. I asked them, 'We rinse off our lab instruments, don't we?'"

They were both laughing now as the chemist mentioned the funny faces he saw as his co-workers connected the dots.

"So what's the deal with that?," Dad asked. "Well," replied the chemist, "I think it goes back to centuries of just washing with water. When soap came around, they viewed it as something to simply just add to the water to make washing easier, or better, or whatever. And to this day most Europeans still don't rinse."

"Huh. Interesting."

And so it is. Now the question, What turned Americans on to the sanitary act of rinsing? looms large.

My roomies probably look at me when I'm doing my dishes and think, "Dumb Americans, always wasting water..." And then they talk about it in German when I leave the kitchen, "Why does he do that?" "I don't know. Maybe he has OCD?"