Was I justified in my decision?
About 2 years ago, I had 3 roommates (all men). And as a result the kitchen area, and the dishes were seldom taken care of.
On one particular day, I begin to cook myself some scrambled eggs and make some toast. Shortly after I begin to make my food, my roommate Mike starts to make himself some spaghetti. After my food was done cooking, I grab a fork, my plate, sit down and begin to eat. Shortly after I start to eat, mike finished making his spaghetti.
He opens the drawer to find out that I had taken the last fork that was clean. He then pulls out of the drawere a spoon and says, “Dan, would you mind trading me your fork for this spoon?” And I reply with “haha, no, I’m using it to eat my eggs.” And he gets a bit upset, and we got into a little debate over whether I should relinquish my fork for his spoon since I could easily have used the spoon to eat my scrambled eggs, but I argued that he should have simply cleaned his own fork, and saved us both the time of arguing about it. I should note here, that the sink was full of dirty dishes, but it would have only taken a matter of seconds to clean a fork, and I was also in the middle of using my fork, which I had assumed he would have to clean anyways.
Should I have swapped him the fork for the spoon, should he have cleaned his own fork? Was I right in denying my fork since I was using it, and didn’t want to use a spoon.
What would you have done?
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That’s nothing, about 8 years ago I let someone in front of me onto the bus and they didn’t say thank you, can you believe it!
I would have told him to wash a fork and then shove it up his own ass.
haha thanks bluemukaki…can’t believe you didn’t get a thank you…as bad as you letting someone into your lane on the highway and not getting a thank you wave.
I would have gotten FEMALE ROOMMATES.
They prefer having men as roommates, because guys are not always “borrowing” their make-up, and their boyfriends.
@Jack, I’m a girl and I wouldn’t have washed the fork. Of course I wouldn’t have asked Random for his fork either, I would have attempted to eat my spaghetti with a spoon, or maybe found a serving fork. @Random you were fine, hold tight to that fork.
Girls are always washing things…
That is what makes them girls…
@JackAdams: Were you sick the day they taught anatomy?
@MrDan: I wonder if he was planning on eating his spaghetti with a fork you had used without washing it. No offense, but… eew
@poofandmook yeah I thought the same thing
I’m telling ya, Guys…
Female roommates are better…
I’ve never had a male roommate, in my entire life.
OK, Dan has told the story in a biased manner. Allow me to retort.
A. I was cooking the spagetti first.
B. In order to get a fork to clean, I would have had to dig through a pile of dishes (with fruit flies circling it) to get a fork to clean. Everyone always threw the forks into pools of disgustingness. And the fault for the dishes was on no “one man” It was the fact that they piled up very quickly because we all ate a great deal.
C. He began cooking the eggs after I started making the spagetti. Everyone knows spagetti takes longer to make than eggs.
Dan says I got very angry right away. This is not true. I thought he was joking.
You can eat scrambled eggs with a fork easily.
You cannot eat spegetti with a spoon easily.
Dan and I are very good friends. I would hsve gladly traded my fork for his spoon if the situation were reversed. He knows this. Around that time I was constantly going out of the way to help him.
I let him money on countless occasions.
I gave him rides to pick up his car after it had been towed. Often, because his car was towed like once a week.
I talked him out of joining the peace corp to follow a girl he met one night.
I AM A GOOD FRIEND!!!!
I would have given him the fork, to save him the hastle of fishing through the bowels of our kitchen sink to search for a dirty, crusty fork to clean.
To make matters worse, he also stated that he “could not” eat scrambled eggs with a fork. Now that is just a damn lie!
Here is Proof Positive that spaghetti can indeed be eaten with a spoon!
Actually…spaghetti takes about 4 minutes to cook after you get the water to a boil. In either case, I was using the fork when you asked me for it.
And I just stated here that I could use either a fork or a spoon to eat. At that moment, I may have said something like, I prefer eating my eggs with a fork, but I doubt I would have said “I can’t eat eggs with a spoon”
That is definitally what you said. That is why the rest of us were so upset! You said that you not only could not eat scrambled eggs with a fork, but that you would not!
It should be noted that the other 2 guys we lived with were on my side. They told dan that he was in the wrong.
@mowens and Random, I have three words for you both WASH THE DISHES!! Fruit flies? Come on fellas, quit exchanging barbs on fluther, grab a sponge and some Palmolive and get to work.
the details are somewhat irrelevant as to who sided with who, or what I said then…I still use a fork whenever I eat my eggs, and it will always stay that way.
It should be noted that I have very poor coordination. Dan knows this.
@supermouse I actually live with just my brother now, our place is always clean =)
Dan also insists on using the word demand. I did not start out demanding the fork. I first politely asked. When he siad no, I thought he was joking. Then I got upset when he siad he could not eat eggs with a spoon.
Lets do this… How many of you, when you have the choice, eat spagetti with a spoon?
@mowens, actually you were the first one on this question to use the word demand.
They argue just like a married couple…
Wait a minute here! I skipped the intro and jumped right to the dilemma! You mean to say this happened years ago and you are still arguing about it? And they say women hold grudges. Geeze Louise boys, buy some extra forks to carry when you visit each other’s houses, and get over it already.
We did. This comes up every once and a while when Dan hits his period.
Use plastic forks. They’re disposable. Use once, then toss.
@everyone haha the only reason this is remembered is because of the humorous content we get out of this question to ask strangers.
It should be noted that my sink now currently has no dirty dishes.
And for the record, most people think mike is ridiculous for requesting my fork as I was using it.
NOT true. The last time we formulated the senario with the wording we both agreed apon, more people agreed with me! I still have that wording if you will hold for a moment i will find it.
I think maybe if you both just got forked every now and then you’d feel much better.
groan!
Where is that stop following button located?
I can’t believe I bothered reading this Q….
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Believe it or not, I am gay, and they are straight. Now that we all live in different places with less people, our places are relitively clean. That was college. I am out, been out for 3 years making a nice living. We have all done well for ourselves. But, the problem with the dishes was that there were simply too many. To keep up, wed have to run it twice a day.
My advice, never live with 4 people.
If you do, only have 4 plates.
thats not a joke. :)
Okay.. um… this was clearly meant for humor and not a real debate. Why so harsh, blah?
Man, if everything Mowens says is true, then a fork is easy as an acid test of friendship. How do you sleep at night?
yeah blah, it was for humor.
wait. Hold on. I find it very suspect that there are all of a sudden new users who are coming into this thread to comment. RandomMrDan, is this your sick way of doing a membership drive?
haha, no I sent mike the question for him to defend himself…this blah person I imagine is someone who wants to remain annonymous.
Put your big girl panties on and do the dishes!!
Here is the thing… no one ever did all the dishes because we all gave up… one person would do them, the dishes would pile up, do them again, pile, again, then they gave up. Each person would simply say “screw it”
And rightfully so. No one person should have done all the dishes.
oh, and rocketsquid, I don’t know who he is either.
All this was two years ago and you’re still bickering about it???
haha we’re not bickering scamp…we are having fun about it. And we like to see who agrees with who…don’t worry most people agree with me keeping my fork though.
seriously? humor? try a knock-knock joke. i actually find the thought of coming down with food-borne illness rather unfunny. and further, i figure a sufficiently stern rebuke might actually dissuade yourself and other readers from living like that. honestly, it wears on the psyche. moreover, i think we all have had roomies with truly unacceptable cleanliness habits at some point in the past, and facing the issue can cause some very ugly politics. relying on clean habits rather than the strength of your friendship to maintain peace entails substantially less stress while providing a longer lasting, more durable accord within the household. i’ve seen best friends turn to enemies because they tried to live together and later failed because everyone expected the others to pull more weight around the house. just trying to help you out.
Alright, anyone who is following this thread…I’d like hear who is justified and who isn’t, as opposed to everyone telling us to clean our kitchen and do our dishes.
I agree with you keeping your fork too. Finders keepers and all that! So have you all invested in plastic cutlery yet? Problem sloved.. then on to who takes out the trash!!
I agree with Dan. Sorry, Mowens.
blah, get a life, it’s not that rough. They already said their current living arrangements are clean.
Blah:
I’ll have you know that I have known Random for almost 6 years now, and have roomed with him for 4 of those 6. We are good friends. Nothing really angers us, life is to short to worry about politics. It really is.
thanks poof and scamp….and yeah really, I have since joined the guard, and moved in with my brother and my place is always clean.
@Blah______
Obvious troll is Obvious.
so far Dan has 4 people who agree, and Mowens has 0
you pigs need to clean your dishes! end of story.
get a life? funny. can you really claim to have a life while participating in this thread? despite doing so, i imagine that you nonetheless have so much to offer the world that i don’t, and thus have a much more legitimate life than i, right? stupid question yielding stupid answer, and now you call me kill-joy? fine, live in squalor and filth. simply, i don’t find washing dishes that challenging. if now they live cleanly, then i imagine they’d agree. and we all write anonymously on this thing, whether our screen names have bells and whistles or just blah. but thanks for that criticism too. and i guessed single, not straight, by the way.
Dont look now, but you are participating in this thread as well. :)
Can’t you guys just agree that for all future get-togethers, you will each provide one of these?
You guys are cute.
But to actually answer your question…personally, I would have washed him another fork. If we both want a fork, we should both have a fork. One fork already in use and a dirty fork to be washed. Makes sense to keep using the fork I’m already using. Comes down to who hates washing forks more…you or Mowens?
Dude, wash a fork, wait for him to finish his eggs, use the spaghetti fork or BBQ tongs, forge a new fork, bend a coat-hanger into a fork, whatever. Once the guy is eating with the fork leave it the fork alone. :^> Cheers!
Or you could tell the lazy bastard to wait until you finish eating and lick it clean for him.
@blah____ Go the extra mile. Use capitals where needed. Then maybe you can judge someone else for seeming lazy.
but anyway, fun question. i hope the dude asking for the fork would’ve probably wanted to wash it before using it to eat the spaghetti, rather than take it straight from his roomie’s mouth. so essentially, asking to trade shouldn’t have saved any work.
or maybe just eat with your hands. or ask the fruit flies to pick the spaghetti up off the plate and transport it to you stomach. or perhaps let it sit for a couple days, congeal into one big mass of spaghetti/spaghetti sauce and swallow whole.
and if you read carefully, the message about participating in the thread went like this, in simpler terms that mowens apparently needs:
someone said, “hey blah, get a life.” i said, “participating in this thread indicates a lack of life,” meaning that neither of us have a life, so don’t suggest that i do something that you yourself have failed to do. geez.
really? criticizing punctuation? i save energy on useless things like capital letters in blogs, while others save energy by leaving heaps of insect-ridden dishes, but i have place to talk? sure, dude.
so blah…you agree with me then?
yeah, asking for someone else’s recently dirty fork to avoid washing a longtime dirty just offends all sense of reason.
so thats what…like everyone here…agrees with me….yes
It takes less effort to use capitals, you know…dude.
i think scamp should post a new question on fluther:
“does it take more or less energy to use capital letters while typing?”
any guesses on the result? on my computer, inserting capital letters into typing requires the depression of the shift key, while lower-case letters require no such depression. maybe you have a telepathic keyboard? so actually, no, i don’t know… dude.
[gouges out eyes with RandomMrDan’s dirty fork]
[Fluther Moderator]: as fun as this slapstick comedy is, let’s bring it back down to a quality discussion, before I whip out some lipstick for you pigs!
@sndfreQ so what do you make of the fork and spoon debacle? was I right? or should I have given him my fork?
Thanks sndfreQ! Spoken like a true gentleman!!
Yeah it’s sort of not fair for you to put on your moderator pants, sndfreQ, without putting on your Flutherer pants afterward :)
You are justified. Unbelievable this person couldn’t simply have washed a fork. By the time he had the argument with you and it was done and over with, he could have easily have washed a fork and had his spaghetti eaten.
If anybody ever calls me lazy… I’ll tell them this story!!!
Sporks for all, for the record…
Me-I’m half Filipino and would have resorted to kamayan (eating with hands)...but in all seriousness, the fork argument seems to be a smokescreen for the larger issue-not establishing a set of ground rules for the roommates as to shared house priviliges.
Rock-paper-scissors when all diplomacy fails-end of conflict!
That said, my parents made me and my brother do all of the chores in our household from age 8-I have no fear in cleaning anything up-you all were acting like a bunch of wimps in that situation so I call it “a wash!”
(puts mod pants back on and gropes floor for lipstick) cheers gang-you’re the best :)
Wash the friggin’ dishes.
Furthermore, what would have been so hard about washing a dirty fork?
Grab dirty fork, soap, scub, rinse. You don’t even have to dry it, for chrissakes.
Seems like an awful lot of tears and angst wasted over plain old laziness.
Mr. Dan, you’re not off the hook either. Those were your dirty dishes too.
A demerit each, and KP duty for the week for both of you. Hup two three four…
@sndfreQ, that’s totally what i meant to say.
@author, sorry about the losers jab. meant it with love? and you can totally score heaps of sporks at a fast food joint with some craftiness. or smart & final with a couple of bucks. and in your buddy’s defense, you can probably eat eggs just as effectively with a spoon, while spaghetti would require a greater struggle. and since you shared in creating the dearth of clean eatingware, you probably should have considered trading and let him take sloppy-seconds on the fork at his own peril. on principle, you still win. but as a friend, perhaps you might’ve indulged his sloth? also, this way you can later borrow his underwear if you don’t have a clean pair, or maybe he’ll let you take first crack at the last piece of dental floss when you get to the end of the roll, or something to that effect. bargaining power, my friend…
since i already read the thread, i might as well put my vote in too. i would have to go with dan on this one. first come first serve…
I’m with you too Dan. Couldn’t wash a fork because he’d have to dig through the dirty dishes? Poor baby!!!! Sounds like an excuse to me!!! ;)
Also sounds like a guy thing. Before I married my husband we lived with two other guys, both bachelors. They used to make a meal in an electric frypan where they’d throw in anything and everything they could find, noodles, mince meat, veggies etc. I only ate it on the first day, because they didn’t ever put the left overs in the fridge. They just left it in the pan they cooked it in, on the bench. Then they’d come home, turn on the pan and re-heat it. This happened day after day until it was gone. By which time those two usually had food poisoning and things were coming out of both ends!!! One of them also had a habit of opening a can of tuna, leaving the leftovers in the can, put it in the fridge without covering it, forgetting it was there for about a week, finding it in the fridge a week later, sees it has a green ring around the top of it, eats it anyway, gets food poisoning….. Anyone see a pattern? How they every survived is beyond me, they could have killed themselves!!!
@tantigirl think of it as a vaccine to build ammunity to such disease and illness =)
though I will admit, it sounds rather disgusting. I always use tupper ware when I put away food.
Ok, I stopped reading after the first third of this. Mikey, you should have just washed a fork. It was wrong and disrespectful of you to ask Dan for a fork that he was using. Come ON! Maybe you should have waited a few more minutes for him to finish eating. Forget the he said, he said. Wrong, is wrong no matter how you look at it. Discourteous, is still discourteous, and shows lack of respect for Dan.
@cyndyh: My own! It’d be less painful then some of the lack-of-humor-need-a-life comments that have been thrown out here!
Here’s the deal. Get in a friggin time machine. Run back to present. Buy a stick of dynamite. Set off stick of dynamite. Go back to that time. Problem solved! You might even find a way to stay out of jail doing it this way!
Oh. Not necessarily in that order. But hey! You’ve got a time machine, so who cares. Sort it out later.
Oh. Wait. You already did that. Nevermind.
@poof: I know. I just thought it was funny that you didn’t specify, and after all of that it wasn’t clear whose eyes I would pick. :^>
@daloon: hell, if they have a time machine they can go back to when the dishes were clean and get a few forks. But I guess then they’d have had this argument one meal sooner. lol.
I could go back in time and just give the inventor of the spoon and fork a spork…then we’d never have this problem.
This question was improperly formatted, Daniel.
I’m not sure that there would be much to sway the masses here mike…it seems rather unanimous. What minor detail, or phrase do you not agree with?
I have all girl room mates, I would have said can I use the fork, my Kelly would have licked it clean and switched. If you go to clean a fork in the dirty sink you would have to clean everything in the sink. Either to get it all out of the way, or simply because you acknowledged that. Not a big deal, although I understand the ice breaking value. :)
It was the principle of the matter. :P
Oh and I still say I am right.
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