I couldn't believe it.

Then my wife showed me the story right there in the newspaper. And I still can't believe it.

I used to work for the New York Times, by which I mean I delivered their Sunday newspapers for a few months when I was young. But I still feel a connection to them — and I assume they have equally warm thoughts of me. So I tend to give them a little extra credibility in what they say.

And what they said was: Young people don't know how to do dishes.

They didn't say it in those exact words. But that was the gist.

The Times has a feature called Wirecutter, in which they test and review any type of products from computers to eyeliners to nonstick rolling pins. It's sort of like Consumer Reports, only I never delivered Consumer Reports.

In one Wirecutter — which turns out to be from the summer, only I just saw it now — they delved into the best way to hand-wash dishes.

As expected, they recommend their favorite brands of soap (Palmolive Ultra Pure + Clear Dish Liquid, Dawn Platinum Dishwashing Liquid and Cleancult Dish Soap Lemon Verbena) and dish towels (Williams-Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels, Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops).

What got me, though was the underlying assumption of the article, which was written by Anna Perling. On her webpage, Perling says she has been a journalist for 10 years, which probably makes her in her early 30s. I assume she wrote the story for people a little younger than she.

"If you’re grasping a slippery, unwieldy bottle with wet hands and squirting soap onto the sponge for each dish, it’s easy to dispense a bigger blob than you need. A pump dispenser can mete out a more-manageable dollop, but it can get tedious reaching for additional soap between scrubs," she writes.

"We think it's more efficient to wash your dishes en masse by filling a tub or sink with soapy water."

In other words, there are people — and she knows them — who add dish soap to their sponge (or dish cloth, which I personally prefer) for every single dish they clean. Maybe every fork and spoon, too.

There are people — and she knows them — who have to be told to wash their dishes in a tub of soapy water.

Presumably, these people grew up in a household with a dishwasher. Dishwashers are wonderful things. I grew up with one, myself. But somewhere along the line, I learned how to wash dishes by hand. I learned not to use a squirt of dish soap with every single dish.

I learned it without being told in a newspaper article. I also learned this, without being told:

"To expedite things and keep your dish water clean, start by scraping any remaining food bits off of your dishes."

The story goes on to suggest soaking pots with dried food on them in soapy water, because that will make it easier to clean later. This is the sort of hard-hitting, privileged information you can expect to get at Wirecutter.

The same is true with this helpful advice: "To make washing go faster, consolidate your dishes in a sink or tub, set up or clear out your dish rack, and clear space on your counter or in your sink."

Obviously, this is information that anyone who will ever wash dishes by hands needs to know. At some point in their lives, someone should have told it to them. Or they could have seen it in a movie. Or a commercial.

A couple of years before I started delivering the Sunday New York Times, I washed dishes at a restaurant. We did have an industrial dishwasher — you wouldn't believe how fast those things are — but before I loaded dishes into it I had to give them a preliminary wash to clean away all residual food.

If I had used fresh dish soap on every single dish, the manager would have laughed me out of the kitchen.

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