musings on dishsoap

I just noticed that my dish soap says it is has the scent of “Green Tea and Melissa.” Come again? Melissa?? What the hell is Melissa? So I had to consult Wikipedia. Apparently it is some sort of lemony minty plant.  Boring.  It would be way cooler if the soap was supposed to smell like another Melissa, the woman from Greek mythology who “raised the infant Zeus in Crete, nursing him with goat’s milk and honey.”  The label could have a burly lady in viking hat cradling baby Zeus in one arm and squeezing a goats udder with the other. Maybe I should take this issue up with Hepi, the maker of my soap.  Another thing Wikipedia just taught me is that apparently “the reduced surface tension of dishwashing water, and increasing solubility of modern surfactant mixtures, allows the soap to run off the dishes in a dish rack and the remaining traces of dishwashing liquid can dry off fast and do not pose any health or taste problems.” Man, how much time have I wasted in my life rinsing off every bit of dishsoap? Hours? Days? No more.  That stuff just goes away on its own.  Science does it again.

Why does my dish soap have to smell like anything though?  Maybe its just cause I am mostly a mouth breather, but I have never been washing dishes and taken the time to notice the scent of tea, lavender, or whatever other smells they have.  It could smell like absolute heaven, but my mind would still be focused on how bored and annoying it is to do the dishes.  No amount of artificial lab-made honey smell is going to change that.

Is it so the dishes smell nice when you are done washing them?  Once again, I have never gotten pleasure out of taking a whiff of my dishes once they are clean.  I honestly could not even tell you if they smelled any different than before.  Do I want my dishes to smell like some exotic flower?  If I have guests over should I be offended if they don’t compliment the fresh smell of orchid emanating from their silverware?  No, of course not, because no one in the history of the world has ever noticed the smell of their dishes.  Just another marketing scam.

Speaking of scams, what if I made a dishsoap that promised to coat your dishes with vitamins and antioxidants?  Like, you use it on your dishes and somehow not only do your plates get clean, but they now have a thin, invisible film of vitamins on them.  The coating lasts a week or so, and every time you eat off that plate whatever you put on it absorbs a daily supply of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.  Thus, every meal becomes healthy.  Parents would love to justify throwing the Burger King out there for dinner by using the vitamin plates.  Everyone would feel good about whatever they ate.  Restaurants could advertise that they only use the vitamin dish soap, a surefire way to boost business.  Then I could come out with the protein version, the dairy version, the immune boosting version.  The possibilities are endless.  The best part is, the soap does not even actually have to have vitamins in it.   I just need to run some commercials with Lance Armstrong claiming he only used the cancer fighting version of my dishsoap during his road to recovery, and that Jared the Subway guy only ate off plates washed with my diet dishsoap.  The placebo effect will take it from there. I watched a video recently where Doctors told these Army veterans with chronic knee pain that they were going to get arthroscopic surgery to cure their pain.  In reality, they just knocked the person out, made a couple of marks so they thought they got cut open, and then woke them up.  Both people reported their knee pain being gone after the fake procedure.  I bring it up because it is pretty much an exact parallel to my dishsoap idea.  Tell people they are getting healthier from eating off these plates, and they will just feel healthier, especially after I bombard them with commercials.  If a class action lawsuit comes in a few years then so be it, I will already be off on my Yacht, riding the fruits of “Drew’s Pure Protein Power Packed Pestilence Punishing Dish Soap” off into the sunset.

O ya, basketball.  I am getting an MRI next tuesday.  Assuming all goes well I will soon be popping up in the basketball box score section of a regional Israeli newspaper near you.