Limerick man's viral post about his dishwasher surpasses 85,000 retweets

A LIMERICK man whose tweet about his dishwasher went viral has said that the experience has been “bizarre”.

Mike McLoughlin tweeted his revelation, after 10 years in his house, that you can raise the upper shelf of the dishwasher to fit the bigger plates down below. The tweet quickly went viral, garnering more than 85,000 likes and 15,000 retweets.

Thousands of people admitted that they didn’t know the trick, with one man saying that he has been putting in his plates at an angle for nearly 20 years.

Mike has since been featured on radio stations and in newspapers around the world, from New Zealand and Australia to Russia to Nigeria.

“I’m just having a laugh at it all. I put up a self deprecating tweet to laugh at myself. But it turns out loads of other people had missed it too, and it spread like wildfire,” he told the Limerick Leader.

The local dad has given interviews with RTÉ, the BBC and even to a radio station in Dubai.

Sun, the producer of dishwasher tablets, have even given the man a five-year supply of tablets.

“They ran the maths on how many dishwasher tablets I would have used, and rounded up, kindly offering me enough tablets to run a wash every day for the next five years - 1800 dishwasher tablets!” said Mike.

The tweet started to get likes straight away, but Mike said that it started spreading to a wider audience when comedian Pat Shortt retweeted in the first 20 minutes.

“It’s two types of people are retweeting, those laughing at me, and those who genuinely had no idea. I’m getting so many people sending photos of their dishwashers, it’s so weird,” he said.

“It’s getting translated into so many languages too. I just heard that a friend’s mother back in Finland was at a Spanish language course last night, and the tweet was brought up as a topic of conversation to practise with.”