Surface to Floor Mess-ile
November 11th, 2005
Tidy surfaces are a beautiful, calming sight. Katazukue, the Tidy Table is a bit like the cleaning lady we had at university. Every day she would go into the kitchen, take the piles of dirty plates, pans and cutlery and dump them en masse into the sink. Then leave them there to stagnate until we got back from lectures.
I think she expected one of us to see the greasy, food-speckled mountain overflowing from the double sink and drainer, feel guilty and wash everything up. Maybe, she thought we'd take turns and perhaps even draw up a rota, thus becoming great housemates and better citizens of the world. Anyone who has been within 40 metres of a student kitchen will know that this is not the likely outcome.
The actual result was that, on needing to prepare food, people just pulled everything out of the sink onto the worksurface again, then washed just their own stuff up, leaving the rest to congeal. Consequently a cycle occurred which meant that some people's dirty crockery ended up being double, even triple-dipped – each time gaining another layer of food from the communal pond. Sieves became like army camouflage helmets.
My reaction to this was simply to wash up immediately after I cooked and hide my stuff in my room. It's simple really. I was crap at being a student. So this Katazukue table interests me insofar as it attempts a similar mind-trick. By conveying the contents of its surface onto the floor at periodic intervals, we are forced to choose between two opposing behaviours; that of putting everything back in its place after we use it; or losing everything into a jumbled pile and dealing with it later.
I have about five cardboard boxes full of stuff I've hurriedly tidied off surfaces just before someone important visits and never sorted through since. I guess the table would have saved me the rushing around…