Only unskilled management hires unskilled labor

Prepping a bottle for use in home-winemaking isn't exactly cutting-edge in terms of technology or process. There's warm running water for the initial rinse, which removes dust that you don't want in the cool-water iodaphor bath that sterilizes the glass immediately before bottling/corking.

About the only thing these two basic steps have in common is emptying the bottle of risewater/solution. For me, the routine makes for thinking-time, but Dennis bores more readily than I. That, and he once upon a time earned his crust as a manufacturing engineer for a bottling/packaging equipment firm. Which is probably why it was he who discovered that swirling the contents during draining creates a gravity-enhanced vortex that empties the bottle much more quickly than simply up-ending it over the sink.

To me, finding process improvement in such a "lowly" job as washing bottles merely reinforces the notion that there truly is no such thing as "unskilled" labor. And that excellence in execution can and should exist at all organizational levels. Yes, at some growth milestone, it makes great gobs of sense to hire someone else to do the things that take your time away from the sweet-spot of your own productivity. But choosing a person who's as uninterested in--or mediocre at--those things as you might be cheats all parties involved. That's something I've never understood, despite having seen it all too often in years past.