A pan left soaking too long leads to a broken nose in Brookfield.

Our news guy, Jon Demaster, had this story on WHBL on Tuesday morning.

Reader’s Digest Version*: A husband and wife got in a fight last fall (the night before Thanksgiving), and that fight resulted in the wife throwing a bottle of tonic water at her husband and breaking his nose. What started the fight? A dish that was left soaking in the kitchen sink.

Now I want to go on record about a few things before we hit the meat of this blog:

1. I, Jonathan Henseler, in NO WAY condone violence to solve a conflict. Even if someone did something to piss you off, hitting someone, throwing something at someone, etc. does not follow the code of this blog. Be passive-aggressive on social media if you need to work something out.
2. My wife and I have a pretty simple system when it comes to dishes in our house. If you make food, just do the dishes. Now I do make dinner 85-90% of the time, so I end up doing more dishes at the end of the day, but she makes up for that by making a sh!tload more money than I do. Even steven.

In my past, however, I’ve had PLENTY of bad experiences dish-soakers. A couple of my college roomates were notorious, ‘leave a pan/pot in a pool of water in the sink to let it soak.’

“Just let it soak!” the dish-soakers say. “It will be easier to wipe down and clean in the morning!”

But dish-soakers don’t take care of it in the morning, do they. The next day comes and goes and guess what’s still sittting in the sink? A pot. A pan. A plate. A bowl.

Then the next day comes and goes, and the next, and the next and the next. And all the while, the person who asked them to just do the dishes in the first place just gets madder and madder and madder.

And do you know who eventually ends up doing that dish? The non-soaker. They have to stick their hand in a pool of cold, filth water, with bits of food floating around in it, to retrieve the dish that has now been sitting for 96 hours. They grit their teeth and they clean the dish and put it on the drying rack where it belonged 5 days ago.

So while (again) I’m not condoning violence in any conflict, I do think it is an important detail to the story to know how long that pan had been sitting in the sink. And the night before Thanksgiving! My guess is this couple was probably hosting friends or family the next day, tensions are already running high because the house needs to be cleaned and the dinner needs to be prepped, and there’s that damn pot still sitting in the sink. *AGAIN* violence is not the answer, *BUT* if you leave a pot/pan in the sink to soak for days on end the week of Thanksgiving, you run the risk of getting a bottle of tonic water chucked at you.

*Topical, Jon.

PS: The Break Up is such an underrated movie. The scene where her brother starts singing at dinner always busts me up: