My Papa, a wise, wise man, pointed out this universal truth to me many years ago, when I was a child. It remains a fact as true as ever, so I’m going to share it with you now:

You can’t trust dish scrubbers.

You know what I’m talking about. Those thingies you buy at the grocery store in the cleaning supplies aisle, consisting of a handle you fill with liquid dish soap, and replaceable scrub pads. They make the task of washing pots, pans and the like somewhat less unpleasant, and a bit quicker. They dispense a bit of soap as you scrub. They’re effective, they’re simple, they’re handy. It’s all good.

Eventually, though, the little scrub pads begin to lose their scrubby attributes, eventually wearing down to filthy, useless nubs of plastic scraggliness.

No problem, you think. You’ll just pick up one of those replacement scrub pads you saw at the store, next to the scrub handle you’re using now. There were so darn many of them, they were falling off the hook, they were on the floor, they were stacked in boxes, they were everywhere. So abundant were they, in fact, that you didn’t bother to buy any when you bought the handle, because said handle came generously equipped with one already installed! What a deal.

So the next time you’re pushing that grocery cart around, listening to a lovely instrumental rendition of Lady Marmalade on the store PA system, you remember the filthy nub that’s been hindering your dishwashing performance of late. You make a point of stopping in front of the appropriate shelf in the appropriate aisle, and you look closely.

There are no replacement scrubbers to be found.

In fact, you note that they have radically altered the design of dish scrubber handles, and you further realize that they now sell replacement scrubber pads, in copious quantities, exclusively for the new, ultra-improved dish scrubber handles. Of course, you can’t really tell what’s better about the new ones, but they’re so extremely different, that you figure your old handle must have had a grievous design flaw that has since been addressed with the new handles.

It feels wrong to replace your old handle after so little use, you think. You paid good money for it, predicated on the fact that you’d be able to use it for more than just a few weeks. Gosh, you haven’t even used up all the dish soap in the handle!

But the new pads won’t fit your old handle. And you just can’t go on futilely polishing the baked-on barbecue sauce on your roasting pan with that worn scrubber. You can stand there, rubbing furiously, for days on end and still you’ll be holding a dirty roasting pan. And you want to have pork ribs again soon, ’cause they really are very tasty. You know you can’t resort to the use of power tools at the kitchen sink, because your spouse will scold you. Plus there’s the very real risk of death from electrical shock, and of your life insurance policy not paying out because of the obscure “natural selection” clause that you never thought would apply to you.

You shudder as you snap back to reality from this horrible vision and you decide, reluctantly, to upgrade your scrubber system. But this time, you’re smart: you’re going to buy a couple of replacement pads, too.

Flash forward a few months, and once again you find yourself unable to make a dent in that gosh-darned baked-on BBQ sauce. You probe around under the sink for a bit before realizing that the filthy, scraggly nub on the end of your dish scrubber was – ACK! – your last replacement pad!

No problem, you think. You’ll just pick up a replacement pad the next time you’re at the supermarket.

But of course, you never do. The same scenario repeats itself again. The greenish fluorescent store light does not fall upon any replacement scrubber pads for the scrubber handle you thought was so pimpin’ just a season or two ago. Naturally, they’ve completely changed the design of scrub handles again, no doubt to ward off a series of mysterious and tragic evisceration incidents you haven’t heard of, and they’re now selling exclusively the replacement scrubber pads that fit only the new design.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

It can’t be accidental. I’m convinced it’s a cleverly-orchestrated conspiracy of supermarkets and the plastic goods manufacturers. In fact, though I’ve never actually seen it, I’m pretty sure I know what happens:

Every week or so, after the supermarket closes, all scrubber handles and their corresponding replacement pads are collected in nondescript cardboard boxes by shadowy men in black overalls and loaded onto an unmarked semi-trailer under cover of night. A convoy of these trucks, escorted by black armored Suburbans crewed by burly Uzi-toting security contractors, eventually find their way back to the scrubber handle factory. Upon arrival, the scrubbers and replacement pads are unloaded, unpackaged, and melted down in a big vat of boiling plastic.

By the store’s opening the next day, said plastic has been moulded into the latest radically-different scrub handle designs, cooled, packed, trucked and returned to the store shelves, lying in wait to sucker the next unsuspecting washer of dishes.

I’m totally sure it happens this way. Why? Because the margins on handles far exceeds the profits realized on replacement scrubber pads, silly. (OK, I haven’t really checked, but it would all make perfect sense if this was the case.)

So what, you may ask, can be done in the face of these nefarious forces?

Breaking the cycle, I’ve discovered, is possible. But it requires selfishness and good organizational skills.

Selfishness, because you must buy every single replacement scrubber pad you see when you buy a new handle. Ask the stock boy if they have any more boxes in the back. Buy those too. You must not give a flying rat’s butt about the next guy who comes along looking for a scrubber pad. He’s not your problem.

You’ll need the organizational skills because once you get all those replacement scrub pads home, you have to try and not lose them in the various nooks and crannies of your home over the five or six years it’ll take to go through your scrubber pad inventory.

So don’t trust dish scrubbers. If you follow my advice, you’ll probably recoup your investment in a new scrubber handle, and you’ll be showing the evil powers that make dish scrubbers that you, for one, are no longer going to be toyed with.