Half As Quiet

I have mentioned multiple times recently that the wife is working part time and the money that she earns from that job is going towards projects around the house.  The project list is long and items on it jostle for position.  I try to keep track of what’s next but honestly I could not tell you what is on the top of the list at this time.  I can tell you that toward the top of the list though is a new dishwasher.

The dishwasher we currently use came with the house and is getting up there in years.  One thing the wife has never liked about it is that there are only sprayers on the bottom of the unit whereas most newer models have an extra sprayer for the top rack.  She often corrects my loading of the dishwasher as I put items on the bottom that would inhibit the items on the top layer getting as clean as the need to be.  Anyway, we are in the market for a new dishwasher.

The son was staying with the mother-in-law last night so the wife, daughter and I headed to Lowe’s to check out the dishwashers.  Lowe’s has about 20 floor models with quite a range in price.  The floor models are set up by price and one row has the lower cost models while the row next to it has the high end ones.  We (of course) were in the low cost row looking for a comparable model that would be in the budget.  In the next row was an older couple and the Lowe’s employee assigned to this area of the store.  The older man had the Lowe’s guy move the unit into the middle of the aisle so he could measure it.  The wife and I felt a little unprepared when our whole plan (I guess) was to eyeball whether or not a unit would fit under our counter.

Anyway, while the old man was measuring, the old lady was asking questions.  One question revolved around the volume of noise this particular dishwasher put out.  The Lowe’s dude replied that this unit was only at 57 decibels when running.  From what I remember of my common sounds, that seemed to be pretty quiet.  He (the Lowe’s dude) then added that this amount of sound (57 db) was half as quiet as normal conversation.  This bothered me on two levels.

First of all, normal human conversation is around 50 db so unless the decibel scale is like the earthquake scale (with orders of magnitude), there is no real way that 57 was 1/2 of 50.  Even background chatter at places like restaurants is 60 db.  I think this guy needs to read the brochure again.  The second thing that bothered me was his choice of comparative words.  What does “half as quiet” even mean?  Did he mean half as loud perhaps?  Either way, the math did not work out.

I have heard people use these kind of comparisons before.  Examples like “twice as broke”, “half as ugly”, “half as cold”, etc, come to mind.  Using the opposite end of the spectrum when comparing should make you think twice before believing the person using this language (this is kin to wondering if thaw and unthaw are antonyms or synonyms).

In the end, we did not buy a dishwasher.  It is not that we were doing this as a reaction to the salesman’s poor skills but that we were just not ready to pull the trigger yet.  The models in OUR row (the low cost models) did not really use decibel levels on their sales brochures anyway and used phrases that were trying to convince us that they just worked, not worked quietly.  They might as well add, “unit can be heard throughout the house, just so you know it is working” to the bullet points.

Jon