Dishwasher Tetris

I like to keep even the most mundane of tasks interesting. Being couped up in an apartment with only my thoughts (when the girls are in school) can get boring and monotonous. I crave variety; otherwise, I turn into the human equivalent of asphalt, and I just lay there as life runs me over day after day. Eventually, you just want to pull out the electric razor and slit your wrists.

One of the ways I stave off the day-to-day routine is to come up with games for regular chores. At first I tried experiments with harmless house-hold competitions involving humans, but the results were an utter disappointment. For example, "Crazy Crap Pick-up" where I tracked who among Ashley, Allie and Avery could created the most piles of random crap scattered around the apartment and then picked them up over a week's time was an absolute failure. The scores were usually lower than those of a soccer match (if anyone did get a point it usually was the result of a random accident), and the level of excitement was on par with watching unconcerned lab mice aimlessly wander through a maze at their leisure, occasionally stopping for a twenty-minute nap.

This disaster gave way to games with inanimate objects and included such heart-pounding thrillers as "Toilet Roll Count" where I track how many discarded tubes from a finished roll of TP will pile up on the ground before someone will put them in the trash can located three feet away (high score to-date is 10). Another doozy is "Laundry Drag Racing." In this game, I make teams out of the sorted categories - darks, colors, whites, etc. I then wash and dry all the clothes and throw them into one large mass on the bed where I commence to folding. First team completely folded is the winner.

Favorite among my domestic gaming is "Dishwasher Tetris." In the video game Tetris players take random shapes falling from the top of the screen and fit them into slots at the bottom of the screen much like you would a jig-saw puzzle. The concept is essentially the same in "Dishwasher Tetris." The object is to fit as many dirty dishes from the sink into the dishwasher in the tightest configuration possible. Sounds easy, but it's not as there are some other rules to follow.

- all the dishes must be 100% clean after running them through the washing cycle
- a player can pre-rinse the dishes prior to placing them in the racks, but they cannot cheat by washing them clean in the sink to ensure they will always be clean
- upon completion of the wash cycle, no dish, plate, cup can be chipped or broken, and no plastic items can be melted otherwise this is an automatic disqualification.

So far I think I'm up to 175 wins, 3 losses and 0 disqualifications. Try and find this bad boy on PlayStation 3, I dare you.