It seemed simple enough. Quickly wash up the small pile of dishes before heading out for a coffee at my favourite cafe.
Mission accomplished in six minutes.
I just had to put away that last Tupperware container Kelly used to hold her lunch yesterday.

I opened one of our Tupperware draws to be faced with the usual cluttered sight.

So now I was faced with the dilemma of fitting that very last item into the draw without jamming it open or closed. A task requiring a combination mastery of Rubiks’s cube, Tetris, and Jenga tower stacking.
A degree in multi-dimensional quantum geometry is also useful.

Yes. I hear you.  I could have emptied out the entire drawer and carefully nested the containers, and neatly sandwiched the lids in separate quadrents, all volumetrically proportioned and colour co-ordintated. And to be sure I have done this before. Maybe even twice.

But here’s the thing with Tupperware drawers. You get them looking obsessively compulsively packed to perfection. The very next time you open the draw (even if it is just 5 microseconds later), it looks like a passing migration of banded armadillos has paused their journey just long enough to engage in a little mass armadillian drawer orgy.

Instead of emptying out the entire draw I opt for some quantum geometry.
I can see that there is a space just about the right shape, one layer down.
My container will fit snugly into the one beneath once I take out that plastic lemon squeezer thingy and that smaller pink pasta canister.
OK.

Now the pink canister will just about fit at the front if I move some of these lids to the back, which will require a 90 degree shift to that blue lunch box.
Oh, the lunch box has some plastic egg poacher doohickies in it. No problem… I’ll just fit them over in this round bowl….that seems to be wedged tightly into that rectangular cake box.

It seems that during all this reorganising the top-level of the entire hermetic disaster has risen significantly above the height of the drawer so it will no longer close.
I am left standing with a yellow plastic lemon squeezer in one hand and six hundred and fifty-three separate items of Tupperware in the other.

Just about now I can hear the sound of inbound armadillos.

Scrap all that.
I just throw everything into the draw and put both my arms into it up the elbows and sort of stir it around. After several minutes things sort of self arrange into this pastel conglomerate of entangled Tupper-rubble. Pushing down on the whole thing as if trying to shut an overseas suitcase, the rubble line settles just enough to get the drawer closed.

I still havent actually got Kelly’s lunch box into the draw so I just leave it on the sink to dry some more.

Sorted.