...Now I'm told that there are people who never use their good china. That seems weird to me. Nothing says "I love you" to a guest quite as much as being willing to wash dishes and glasses by hand (or to pay someone else to do it) afterwards.
I'm gonna probably get in trouble, maybe real bad trouble, for breaking the rules of my Order, but there's a whole chapter in the
Husband's Handbook entitled
The Incompetence Ploy. And the lead example is based on the good china. Now most of us don't really have the "good china," which implies we also have the not-so-good china, and maybe even the double-plus-ungood china, but the
HH says it's permissible to use whatever china you have, regardless of its "goodness." So, you got your brand-new wife, you got your lifelong customs to establish. You say, "Here honey, let me do the dishes." You get in the kitchen, do some of the dishes, take one of the cups from the good china or alternatively the Standard Average China, and throw it hard on the floor. Just as your new wife starts to react to the crash, you scream, "Oh no! Shit! The good china!" (If all you have is the one set, and you are unclear as to its goodness, you can scream, "the china," which will be effective enough.) And then you start guiltily cleaning up the shards. She rushes in, swears with a kind of vehement vulgarity, and announces you are not going to do
that again. And of course you have to find and replace the cup from some startlingly obscure and expensive internet source, but it's worth it. Periodically, you offer to do the dishes again, but you will not be permitted to do so. (A similar technique later in the chapter involves helping with the laundry: specifically, a white silk blouse, and a brand-new red cotton sweatshirt you wore changing the Dexron III transmission fluid; the
HH advises you to be sure you wash them using dishwashing liquid in the washing machine and MaxHeat on the dryer.) It's probably too politically incorrect to mention on a nice liberal site like this, but all was foreshadowed and forewritten in Uncle Remus: "Please,
please, please don' throw me into the briar patch, B'rer Bear."
(The first rule of the
Husband's Handbook is to deny there is a
Husband's Handbook. Happy incompetence to you and yours.)