If you spring it, you will have to chew your arm off to get out

posted Sat, 09 Apr 2005

I hate cleaning the drain trap in the kitchen sink.

But I do it! Yes, even though it is a disgusting chore, I still do it because if I don’t, I will have a repulsive kitchen sink.

But I have noticed others take a different approach. When I was working in Washington DC as a temporary secretary at the World Bank while I was still naïve enough to think that someone would see my other qualifications – master’s degree, foreign language fluency, international work experience – and hire me for a real job at the Bank, I lived in a group house with three guys.

Group houses are very common in DC. Basically, you acquire roommates you don’t know because there is no way anyone can afford to live alone in DC unless she has a real job or a trust fund and sometimes not even then. For $400 a month (this was in 1996), I shared a house with three other people and didn’t even have a phone.

So these three guys – all mid-20s – didn’t care too much about kitchen hygiene and always left the kitchen a mess. If they did bother to wash dishes, they always took the drain trap out of the sink so it wouldn’t get any food caught in it.

I thought this was just because they were young and immature and, well, slobs, but now I think that perhaps there are many people who misunderstand the function of a drain trap. At work in the break room, we have a refrigerator, microwave, ice machine, and coffee grinder, but there is no garbage disposal in the sink.

There is, however, a drain trap. You know – to catch the bits of food that are released when people rinse their lunch dishes in the sink and to prevent them from clogging the plumbing in this 11-storey building.

But most of the time, the trap sits on the counter next to the taps. You don’t want that thing to get dirty, you know.