The Ten-Minute Dishwashing Rule and Other Small Tyrannies

I fell down a Reddit hole yesterday that had nothing to do with tech and everything to do with dish soap. A young intern at a small healthcare business posted asking whether it was unreasonable that a senior staff member told her off for taking longer than ten minutes to wash up after a shared lunch for six people. Plates, bowls, the works, one set of hands, one tea towel, and someone standing over her with a stopwatch in their head.

Ten minutes. For six people’s worth of pot luck dishes, some of which apparently had baked-on food and a fork with silicone bits stuck in the tines. I’ve done dishes for six people at home after a barbecue and it’s taken longer than that with a dishwasher doing half the work.

What got me wasn’t really the maths, though the maths is obviously wrong. It was the shape of the whole thing. Reading through the comments, it became clear pretty quickly that this had nothing to do with dishes at all. The senior staff member, by the intern’s own account, never washes a single plate herself. She has an assistant make her coffee. She doesn’t tell off the other staff when they make mistakes. She just happened to walk all the way from the office to the kitchen, on this particular day, to comment on the speed of a 22 year old doing an unpaid-adjacent internship. That’s not a productivity concern. That’s someone finding a person who can’t easily push back and deciding to have a go at them, because they can.

I’ve worked in enough offices to recognise the type without needing to meet her. Every workplace has at least one person who treats the org chart like a licence. They’re rarely cruel to your face in a way you could screenshot and take to HR, if there even is an HR, which in this case there wasn’t. It’s smaller than that: a comment about timing, a look, a “just letting you know” that’s really a warning shot. The intern described it well, that horrible dawning realisation that what looked like kindness for months was actually control, and that she was the only one it was ever aimed at.

I had a manager once, years ago, back before I moved into anything resembling a senior role myself, who used to time how long people took at lunch. Not officially. He’d just mention it. “Big lunch today?” if you were five minutes over. Never said it to the two blokes on the team who regularly took ninety minutes and called it “networking.” I left that job eventually, not because of him specifically, but because working somewhere that runs on who’s allowed to get away with things and who isn’t grinds you down slowly, in a way that’s hard to point to on any single day.

There’s a version of this argument that says the intern should just document everything and go through proper channels, and that’s decent practical advice if there’s a channel to go through. Plenty of the commenters said exactly that, and they’re not wrong. But it also assumes an even playing field that doesn’t exist for someone doing an internship at a business with no HR department, a boss who’s already hinted she doesn’t love the idea of the intern hearing about other job opportunities, and a workplace that apparently keeps CCTV footage of staff mistakes on a manager’s personal phone. That detail alone would have me updating my resume from the car park.

What strikes me about these threads is how often “unreasonable request” turns out to be a stand-in for “unreasonable amount of power with nothing to check it.” The dishes were never the point. The point was that someone with more standing than you can invent a rule on the spot, apply it only to you, and expect you to just absorb it because pushing back costs you more than compliance does. That’s not really a cleaning tip. It’s a workplace one, and a pretty old one at that.

I don’t have a tidy fix for it, because there isn’t one that fits in a blog post. Bad managers exist, small businesses without HR are common, and interns are structurally about as powerless as workers get. What I’d say to anyone in that position, though, for whatever it’s worth from a stranger on the internet: your instinct that something is off is probably right, even when everyone around you has normalised it. Write it down, like the commenters said. Keep an eye out for the exit. And when you eventually get somewhere with a bit more standing yourself, remember what it felt like to be timed on ten minutes of dishes by someone who’s never once picked up a sponge.