The climate has gone haywire. The world is at war. People are depressed. And one of the reasons people are depressed is because they encounter so many articles on the internet that start out “Six ways you’re doing [x] wrong.”

I already assume I load the dishwasher wrong. I’ve never been confident about it. Every time I open someone’s dishwasher I am completely at sea. I felt that way about my own at first, too. I just started jamming things in until my haphazardy solidified into policy. “That’s not where that goes,” I will think, haughtily, when someone else loads my dishwasher. Although sometimes I think their way works a little better, and I quietly revise my policy.

I like to be helpful when I’m at a friend’s house, but I dread opening that dishwasher. It looks like one of those carnival games where you’re supposed to toss the rings over the pegs and it looks easy but it isn’t. I feel the same sense of panic as when I show up in a foreign airport and everyone’s bustling this way and that and I need to figure out the money situation and find the exit to the train station and puzzle out a ticket kiosk and there I am, trapped in a turnstile with a tear in my eye and a dirty dinner plate in my hand.

I am neither a good traveler nor a dishwasher savant.

I’m a handle-up flatware person. This is because I want to grab all the handles at once to unload, without touching the business ends. Other people feel strongly it should be the other way around. According to the internet, it should be knives down, forks up, and spoons alternating so they don’t glom together. What a jumble. Well, I’m careful not to glom. I can unload my flatware in a jiffy and if there’s one or two items that aren’t clean, I run them under the faucet.

Screw the internet anyway. The internet says you should steam salmon in your dishwasher, right after washing your flip-flops.

Also, it says you should not scrape your plates clean first. Evidently the detergent is designed to interact with food particles, and scraping might inhibit the cleaning cycle. Well. I happen to be in the clean plate club. I like food. There will not be a grain of rice left on my plate. Now I have to toss a muffin in there with them, shut the door, and hit start.

I don’t know if dishwashers had been invented yet when I was little. In any case my parents wouldn’t have sprung for one because they never bought anything they didn’t need and they already had a dishwasher. Me. My sister and I did the dishes every day and Bobbie did the drying and putting-away because she had eczema or some other convenient plague. Not long after I was on my own I read that you should never use a dish towel, but allow dishes to air-dry instead, a bit of advice that fit very nicely with my own personal ethic of chore avoidance. Letting the dishes soak in the sink also neatly postponed the whole process.

However, we are firmly advised by the internet not to soak our dishes in the sink. All the bacteria in the vicinity will flock to it and make burbly bug soup in there. I don’t see the danger. I know we must be afraid of powerful things we can’t see, like Satan and the sources of Dark Money, but it can be taken too far. If bacteria are so awful, isn’t it good to attract them all to one place, like a bug zapper light? It’s not like I wasn’t planning to rinse.

Eventually.