Showers are nasty. Mildew is our punishment from God for eating apples. Mildew, and the part about how He “will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” Or, “life shall suck,” in some dreadful future translation.

At least that’s what we thought until last week, when we discovered bleach. Good old sodium hypochlorite. It’s actually our gift back to God, where we say, “Hey, Dude, we don’t really want to be surrounded by filth, so eat this!” It’s also good for delivering babies.

Like all great scientific discoveries, this one was serendipitous. I was cleaning the shower, as I am wont to do when it becomes clearly unfit for humans and a visitor is in transit to our apartment. Using some silly, smelly product and a sponge I toiled, but failed utterly; black and orange stains remained. I despaired, gnashed my teeth, tore out my hair, and wept. Later I returned to the shower to find it much cleaner than I had left it. It was as if Gabriel himself had come down and magicked away the foul growth. Forsooth! Again, I wept.

It seemed strange that this random unfashionable cleaner had fulfilled the absurd-sounding pledge of more expensive products marketed on the television, “cleaning without scrubbing.” At this point I began to wonder if the magic of cleaning bathrooms had actually been solved in the chemical-happy mid-twentieth century, and then suppressed by the corrupting power of branding.

I searched upon the Internet of housewives, particularly looking for information that was at least fifty years old. Fortunately, Reader’s Digest has a Web site. I learned from their page about mildew that bleach kicks its butt, especially when supplemented by baking soda.

So we bought a spray bottle, baking soda, and bleach and mixed ’em up. Not according to any particular recipe; I went light on the bleach (maybe an eighth of the bottle) and heavy on the soda and water. Later, after showering I opened a window, held my nose, sprayed that bitch all over the place, then ran out and closed the door. The next week, I did it again.

Ladies, this stuff works. Yes, I realize that there are cheerfully marketed products for daily shower cleaning. But I have no desire to do this every day when I could do it every week. There’s also some insane robot you can mount in your bathroom that sprays an 180º arc of death for you: that product is for really, really stupid people.

And then there are cleaners like Tilex that would probably work even better than my amateur concoction when applied weekly. But what is Tilex anyway? Well, one clue is that it’s manufactured by Clorox. You know, as in bleach. I’m sure they’ve found some other crap to put in there, and there’s a version in a garish purple bottle (looks like it’s for killing roaches, and I’m sure it would too) with a patented formula that is even more expensive than the regular, but why exactly should I care when plain bleach and baking soda do the job fine?

Cost isn’t even my biggest motivator: it’s convenience. Brand name cleaning products come in the stupidest containers. Rectangular prism spray bottles, long on two sides and very short on the third, are good at presenting the product on the shelf and bad at everything else. Like volumetric efficiency. Or standing up. In fact, the feeling I most associate with these products is annoyance as they fall over under the sink when I am looking for something else. They are perpetually 93 percent empty, failing to spray properly, and leaking onto my hands through the nozzle. They are awful.

Given the choice of running out to the grocery to buy an ugly $6 product from people who can’t count or whipping up a 20¢ batch in two minutes at home, I choose the latter. (No, it isn’t possible to just get these things on our weekly run to the supermarket. There is no supermarket, and Fresh Direct doesn’t carry tile cleaners.)

We’re never going to run out of the bleach or baking soda; we’re all set for the apocalypse. The rest of you are going to have nasty showers after the bombs fall and you’ll have to beg the antichrist for Tilex, but ours is going to be sparkling white. If you trade us some batteries, we’ll spray your children’s clothes with bleach and call it even.

Think about that next time you’re stocking up the bathroom.