Dirty dishes - nothing short of torture

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I'm female, 22 and Aspie. Am I the only one who absolutely hates dirty dishes and cold food remnants? I can’t stand the smell of dirty dishes and food that’s gone cold. It makes me want to throw up right there and then. The sight also makes me want to throw up. It just makes me feel really sick, even though I hold my breath.

Whenever I cook or eat I always wash them or put them in the dishwasher immediately, before the remnants have gone cold. Once it has gone cold I can’t even stand to pick it up just to put it in the dishwasher. I feel really embarrassed and useless when I stay over at my boyfriend’s house and his mother is there and I always want to help out in front of her but I can’t stand it and there's always a pile of stuff that needs washing or putting in the dishwasher. I can't even bring myself to approach them. The first time I have ever touched someone else’s dirty dish was his at his house and it wasn't even cold yet. That is a big deal for me.

Dirty dishes cause me a tremendous deal of stress if I have to end up dealing with them and I know that if I keep touching other people's and putting them in the dishwasher, the stress will bottle up and I am going to have a major panic attack one of these days. The thing is, it's not just because I hate the smell, but because it also makes me feel extremely stressed and panicky. I was thinking of buying a gas mask/filter to see if I feel any safer with it on. I have felt this way my entire life: no better, no worse. In fact, I feel sick about many things that are somewhere between liquid and solid, including grime up close or sauces on their own.

Am I the only one who feels this way? How do you cope in front of other people you are not close to (eg. the mother)? This is really horrible.

You're the first person I've seen who sees dirty dishes for what they are, horrific bacteria smeared vessels that should simply be thrown away and certainly not eaten off of again. Yeah, I think I'll stick with paper plates until I can trick a woman willing to do the dishes into marrying me.

Finally! Someone who's willing to address the horrors of dirty dishes.

I fill up the rubber dish pan with scolding hot water and dish soap, then I put this dishes in to let them soak. Later, after the water has cooled down, I clean them off and rinse them. I find this method works best.

Though I'm not freaked out by dirty dishes, I hate letting them sit around. And I hate hand-cleaning them. So I go with the soaking method all the way. Try it.

Chances are you're basically already dead from having touched dirty dishes in the past.

Old, second-hand food. Urgh!!

I can clear up any amount of dead and dying vegetation in the garden. Outdoor detritus and decaying veggie patches don't bother me at all (apart from slugs!), but as soon as it becomes food on someone else's half-eaten plate it becomes the most horrendous slimy nasty mess for me. Even my own plate would bother me, except that I always eat every morsel and leave it almost perfectly clean.

The smell doesn't usually bother me, so long as it's still fresh enough! But the look, the texture, the sight and noise of scraping it into the bin.... I can't do it! Nobody seems to understand how much more *real* my disgust is compared with theirs.

Sorry but dirty dishes torture (having a bad day so the thread topic caused that reaction)

Anyways I can see how that could gross someone out, dirty dishes are not particularly pleasant...but I don't really care myself, but I also prefer dishes are scraped before I wash them its not fun when they have food caked on to them. You could perhaps try some rubber gloves.

Usually, I wash dishes immediately after I've used them. Cold dish-dirt-torture is nothing I'd have to cope with every day.

For me its two things, the slimy texture of handling dirty dishes grosses me out, and the smell. Bad smells make me want to throw up really easily. I at least rinse off plates after I use them and get the majority of it off so that its not a huge deal when it is time to load the dishwasher. What I really hate, is when we keep food leftover, and it sits in the fridge long enough that I fear opening it and cleaning the tupperware out because I know it is going to reek. At that point I just want to call that container a lost cause and throw it away without ever opening it.

And yet, despite this.... I worked as a dishwasher at a Dennys once. Emphasis on the once. I got hired, because I was desperate for a job at the time. Still could not handle it, got overly stressed out from the situation and literally walked off the job after a few hours of my first day. I don't think I have ever washed my hands that many times in a single day before or since. Damned busboys put zero thought to the person who actually has to empty their tubs of dirty dishes and just throw everything in. All the half-eaten, half-drunk waste combined together, with the silverware floating somewhere down in the bottom of that. Having to fish out forks from a combination of coke, and coffee, and orange juice, and eggs, and hashbrowns, and everything else imaginable mixed together. So disgusting.

I cope a heck of a lot better if I have an apron and rubber gloves. It gives mé enough physical distance from the grot to be able to face it. I also need to have the sink and draining board clean and clear. And I need to be able to take things in the right order - glasses, then cups, then moving to greasier stuff, then pots last of all. If someone else fills a sink with everything mixed together and then thinks I'm going to wash them, I really hate that. Soaking is good too, because it'll clean better. But it all takes longer to do than it takes other people, so I dread it, and put it off, and it piles up, and someone piles the sink and drainer with crappy manky stuff, and I'm shuddering at the sight. I can only cope well if I keep it under control and don't let it go too long.
So you have my sincere sympathy!

I'm not fond of dirty dishes, but there is one thing worse -- not having hot water to wash them in.

We have a decent kitchen area at the office now. It didn't used to be like that. The kitchen had a small water heater that was fine for washing your hands occasionally, but for doing dishes, it was a disaster.

I'm fairly picky about having hot water to wash dishes. My preference is for it to be so hot that you have to use tongs or wear rubber gloves to handle the dishes. My preference is to have a double sink, one to wash and one to rinse, and both with the hottest water I can get -- maximum heat on a water heater.

Before the renovation, you couldn't do that. All you could do is run some lukewarm water over the plate, turn the water off, scrub the plate, then turn the water on to rinse it off. The most you could do before the water turned cold before the renovation was three items, sometimes just two. And then you had to wait about thirty minutes to wash three more dishes in lukewarm water.

My niece would occasionally wash the dishes. Since she didn't eat anything at the office, she didn't care about how clean they were. She was perfectly fine with washing the dishes in cold water. Whenever she'd wash dishes, I'd go back later and rewash them three at a time.

Other people's dirty dishes make me want to chunder everywhere. Bleurgh. Mine are ok because I make sure I eat all the little morsels and leave them almost clean anyway. I either put them in the dishwasher straight away or (before I had a dishwasher expecially) put them on the kitchen counter and avoid for days. I have thrown old plates away instead of cleaning them when they got gross.

I also hate food that is between textures! If people even start talking about custard I feel sick. And I have been a pot washer in the past, like Eelektrik. I walked out after about an hour, I just couldn't deal with it.

I am quite bad at dealing with it at other people's houses and I think I must come across as awfully rude but how do you explain your inability to deal with such mundane tasks (especially before even suspecting it could be related to AS/BAP)? If you have a diagnosis then you could explain that it's just one of the things that you would really appreciate not having to do, and help out by making coffee after dinner instead. Or walking the dog. Or something else helpful for those 10 minutes while someone else cleans up.

It doesn't bother me much at all. What will bother me is if someone reaches over and grabs some food off of my plate with a kitchen utensil that they have already been using for eating. At that point, whatever food is left is not going to be eaten, at least by me. It is all I can do to keep from dumping the rest of the food on their head.

One evening at a cafeteria about three miles from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, I was sitting at a table eating when someone else came up to the next table over and started taking the food off of their trays and putting it on the table. One of them was some old guy, probably in his 70s or 80s. When he finished taking the food off of his tray, he set the empty tray on my table.

I couldn't move at all for several seconds in complete disbelief at what he had done. About the time I started moving again, and reaching for the tray, a young woman at the table grabbed it first and got rid of it properly. I'm not sure what I would have done with the tray, but I most likely would have either slammed it down on top of their food on the table or shoved the tray across their table knocking their food onto the floor.



If food is not the proper texture, I can't deal with it at all.

A week or two ago, a co-worker made some banana bread and gave it to me. The only problem was that it was undercooked. Instead of being kind of bready, it was more like a pudding. I ended up spitting the first bite out all over the floor and then threw the entire loaf of bana bread away.

I have a dishwasher, so never need to wash them. But, what I do hate is scraps of food in the sink. I can never get the tiny scraps onto my fork, so I leave them, with the intention of scraping them into the bin. But, then my husband comes along and loads up the dishwasher (he's never happy with the way I load it). He never takes the plates to the bin and just scrapes the food into the sink. We don't have garbage disposal units here. so it's left to me to collect the scraps up and take them to the bin. I've told him over and over not to do this and he says it's OK because he'll take them out, but he never does. I honestly think it's a punishment for not clearing my plate.

I have similar feelings. I can't touch certain things once they've gone cold/been sitting there for a while.

I live with my boyfriend who nearly always refuses to do the washing up. It's about the only cause of arguments in our relationship. He hates mess (clothes on the floor etc) but is happy to live with the kitchen piled high with rotting plates. We have a lot of plates and cutlery, so he never washes anything up. He'd sooner eat cereal out of a glass than wash up a bowl. Ideally, I'd like a couple of forks and knives, some spoons and one plate, bowl, glass etc each. Then I could wash mine up and he would have to wash his, rather than leave it.

I think I'd be better with it if I could use gloves, but gloves designed for washing up are latex, which I'm allergic to. I always try to rinse plates even if I don't wash them straight away. At least then I'm cleaning a plate with nothing on it, rather than having to waste hot water by blasting all the plates to get the congealed food off because that makes me feel sick.

i would suspect not. for that very reason, i use disposable plates and cutlery and drinking vessels.

the only utensils i have to wash are knives and forks (plastic knives and forks are not sufficient for their job).
i buy 50 plastic plates for $3.50, 20 plastic teaspoons for about $1.20, and 25 styrofoam cups for about $2.00 (at various intervals).

when i am finished with my meal, i just reserve my knife and fork and throw everything else into the garbage bin. i only have one knife and one fork due to the fact that i hate to wash up and will use any reason not to do so, and having only one knife and one fork forces me to wash them every time i eat. i always rinse my cutlery after a meal, but i rarely can be bothered to put it away, so every time i eat i have to wash one knife and one fork, and that is relatively easy to do.

and for people who may lambaste me for not being eco-sensitive, the plates and spoons and cups i buy are bio-degradable.