The Principle of Uniform Grunge

While cleaning the kitchen the other day, I was reminded of a principle I had discovered in college,when I shared an apartment on North Calvert Street in Baltimore with another college student and had the use of a kitchen for the first time since I left home.

Being male college students, our standards of cleanliness were not surpassingly high, and months passed before I decided to give the kitchen stove a good clean. I worked with a will, and soon the stove was as pretty as the day it was new, save for the occasional chips in the enamel that had been accumulated over the years and the scorch marks on the burners that refused to succumb to Bon Ami. I stood back and inspected my work.

I immediately noticed one thing: now that the stove was clean, the refrigerator next to it seemed filthy. It had never seemed that way to me before, but next to its gleaming counterpart it was conspicuously in need of attention.

I had discovered the Principle of Uniform Grunge: when the general grunge of a kitchen, or any other space, is of a certain consistency, nothing in particular stands out. It is only when one area is much cleaner than its surroundings that it calls attention to itself, and to its untidier setting.

So I worked on that refrigerator until its condition matched the stove. Proud of my work (particularly since it seemed a better use of time than actual studying), I took a break. When I returned to the apartment later, the first thing I thought was "Gee, that kitchen floor looks really dirty."

You can see where it led from there. By the end of the day, I had cleaned the floor, the sink, and the kitchen cabinets. Only then did the room once more present a general appearance of uniformity, when no particular object stood out. My roommate came home at that point, and complimented me on the kitchen.

"You know," he said, "I never noticed how dirty the dining room is. I guess we should do some picking up there."

I groaned. I had never occurred to me that the Principle of Uniform Grunge applied not only to the kitchen, but to areas beyond it. The balance of the universe had been upset, and there was no telling where it might end. It was obvious that the dining room would be followed by the living room and the halls and, God forbid, the bathroom itself, which in most male-occupied apartments is a veritable monument to Grunge.

The Principle of Uniform Grunge explains a great many things about other aspects of the world. For example, consider the person in your office who does everything a little better than you do. If that person didn't exist, there would be no comparisons to be made regarding your own performance, or that of your co-workers. It's only when that person's performance becomes conspicuous that your own suffers in the comparison. I think that this is the reason that when you learn of this person's faults, you experience a curious sense of satisfaction. The perfection is just skin-deep, you realize, and underneath there is a person as flawed as you are. If that were not so, you would be obliged to improve yourself up to that person's level, and who wants to do that?

And there's the classic situation of a street with many old, comfortable houses. One burns down and is replaced with a sleek, modern structure with exquisite landscaping and a multi-car garage. Suddenly, the other houses look shabby by comparison, and their owners begin to notice the overgrown shrubbery and cracked driveways in their own homes. It never fails. The usual response would be to put in a new driveway and break out the hedge clippers, but that will not endear you to your neighbors, because their own homes will look worse by comparison, and force them to spend hours in home improvement that might be more profitably spent on the basketball court or the golf course or in front of the computer playing Farmville. Your formerly friendly neighbors will now shun you, and their dogs will no longer wag their tails at you. You might as well move.

But getting back to my original point about that kitchen on Calvert Street. There was really only one solution to the problem. We let the kitchen return to its normal state of untidiness. Afterwards, when a particular area got really bad, we cleaned it, but not very thoroughly. Instead, we carefully brought it back to a condition to match the rest of the kitchen, so that it would not call attention to itself by being either too clean or too dirty. It took a delicate touch sometimes, but it was worth it in man-hours saved.

The Principle of Uniform Grunge has guided my housekeeping strategy to this day, and it has saved me countless hours of labor. I would have used that time to do something like wash the car or repaint the house, but that would have alienated my neighbors, as I have explained. So in the cause of neighborly tranquility, I surf the Internet instead.

For some reason, some of my previous housemates have largely failed to grasp the significance of the Principle of Uniform Grunge. (Most of this subset were female, so it might have something to do with ovaries or estrogen or something.) They insist that the cleaning be done to its maximum extent, regardless of the surroundings. I try to explain that this will never result in happiness, since it dooms one to an escalating series of labors, but I plead in vain. But by diligently applying this theory on the sly, I could get by with an amazing amount of non-housecleaning before they noticed something amiss.

For example, it is impossible to avoid cleaning things once in a while, but the effort can be minimized by a process that artists like to call “feathering in.” Imagine a bathroom with a long counter in which there is a sink more or less centrally located, not unlike the bathroom counter in my present home. (In fact, it is exactly like the bathroom counter in my present home.) The sink is dirty. In fact, the whole counter is dirty. If I cleaned just the sink, the counter would look even dirtier. The solution is to clean the area immediately around the sink well, but not as well as the sink itself … just enough not to call notice to it. About a foot out, give that area a desultory clean, but leave it a little dirtier than the counter area around the sink. Proceed in this fashion to the end of the counter, which you leave untouched. If you have done this skillfully, the transitional areas will be hard to spot. You have saved yourself a little work on the counter itself, but the real benefit is that by leaving the perimeter of the counter as it was, it will not call undue attention to the tub and toilet area, which is where the real cleaning work needs to be done. When your spouse comes home, he or she will say, “Honey, the sink looks great!”

Try it! It might just work for you, too!