After working long hours during summer break, it takes a long hard look in the mirror for me to be able to, for lack of a better phrase, throw away my savings toward rent. All the voices in my head tell me it would be so much nicer to just drop out, drive down to the coast, buy a fishing pole and earn my meals under a warm day’s sun. 

But let’s be honest, my parents would never allow that.

Instead, I wrote that first check for nearly three thousand dollars, the first of three rent payments throughout the year. 

After watching my savings drain before my eyes, there wasn’t much left for the other basic necessities in life. You know, like Wi-Fi and ping-pong balls.

Having three other roommates helps to cut up some of the costs of living, but we were all in the same sinking boat.

Before we moved in, each of us took a trip into our cobweb-filled attics at home, scrounging enough stuff to stock the kitchen and having some furniture, but barely.

This is where the dishwasher really does us in.

No more than nine plates, a handful of bowls and more coffee cups than anyone could ever use made their way into our cupboards. 

With four of us, simple math would suggest that at three meals a day, we have at least a dozen plates. Well, we’re short of that number. 

This would be an easy fix under other financial situations, but we broke college kids don’t play around when it comes to paying the absolute smallest amount to live. 

When we use a dish, the natural thing to do is to put it in the dishwasher, that’s what it’s there for. Then we run out and it’s a real problem. 

Instead of taking the time to wash the plate by hand, it almost always gets tossed into the black box of despair. 

By midday, we have to run the dishwasher. By dinner time, it’s almost never done. Without clean dishes, we are forced to become resourceful — at one point falling as low as using the bottom of a milk jug for a bowl of spaghetti.

During the leasing process our landlord kept pressing that having a dishwasher was a simple luxury that we were lucky to have. 

I’m sure it costs us a few extra dollars per month, too.

What was described to us as a luxury turned out to be a burden. Without the dishwasher, we wouldn’t be eating off of cardboard boxes and milk jugs. 

The crisis of having a dishwasher in a college apartment may not be an epidemic recognized by the government, but believe me, it has consistently made my life much more difficult.