Of Dishwashwers and Discoveries

My dishwasher copped it last week. It wasn't exactly a surprise--it had been letting out death bellows for quite some time, and the dishes were actually coming out at the end grubbier than when they started. When it shifted from Soak to Wash, it let out a loud BANG that made the glasses rattle on the shelves and convince us someone had just lobbed a boulder onto our roof or that someone with nefarious intent was attempting to kick down our front door.

We did the more holistic approach at first--ran a few empty cycles with Tang, cleaned out the traps, globbed JetDry into where we though it should go, switched detergents, actually read the instruction manual, that sort of thing. Nothing worked. Every time it ran, it got louder, grindier, more aggressively louder until we couldn't run it with anyone in the house because it was impossible to carry on a conversation anywhere near a machine that sounded like a room full of drill presses.

So on Tuesday morning, I loaded the thing up with dirty dishes and started it up once more. It lurched through its Soak cycle, then clicked, paused, then made a new sound: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

I let it Grrrrrrrr for about five minutes, then turned it off, let it sit, then tried it again. Soak. Click. Pause. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

Being an engineer's wife, I know a little something about machines and their death rattles. I have a mental checklist that I access from time to time when a machine shows signs of distress, and this noise was very similar to the sound one's car makes when one turns the key and gets that Hum of Doom, the one that says, "Yeah, the starter's fine, but the battery's gone tits up, probably from that inside light you didn't know was on all night. Looks like your day just got a little more interesting, lovey."

In short, that noise means, "You have reached the end of your skill set. Stop and seek assistance before you destroy something."

There's always the outside chance that automation will override a fault in one system, depending on how well a thing is engineered, so I let the dishwasher run for a bit, to see if the Wash cycle would kick in after the Soak cycle reached its end, even if nothing was moving. I loaded Bea in the car for pre-school and threw my class books in the front seat. But something tugged at my common sense and said, "Seriously?? You're leaving a machine that's not functioning properly to fend for itself? What a bright bulb YOU are..."

I went back inside and turned off the dishwasher. When a unit is not behaving as it should, kids, the first thing you do is turn it off as much as possible. THEN YOU UNPLUG IT.So I opened the cabinet under the sink to look for the plug. Not there. I went around to the other side of the counter where this little tiny Cabinet of Mystery lives (we're actually not sure why it's there, and it looks like a secret portal more than anything, so we just just keep phone books and empty mason jars there in case we get sucked down a rabbit hole and need to grab basic supplies on the way), and opened the door. Still no plug, but I did catch a very strong burning smell.

Yup. This dishwasher was done.

I fiddled and poked and sweated a bit more, but still, no plug. So with a prayer to whatever deity was awake, I set off for my day, quashing visions of my house going up in flames as they arose in my thoughts during my Piano II class and Choir rehearsal. I tried to ring hubby, who was coming home early and who would probably wonder why the washer had not been run, but he was in class all that week. I left a message saying, "DON'T RUN THAT DISHWASHER, WHATEVER YOU DO. DANGER WARNING ALERT SMOKEY SMOKE!"

When hubby got home that night, he fiddled with the thing for about 20 minutes, swearing and thumping and running down to the basement to retrieve some rarely-used and frankly alarming looking tools. Eventually he used the laptop to watch a video on how to fault-check a washer, and amidst exclamations of, "Ah! So that joins with THAT..." and "Then what do I do with...oh, right, of course..." and other esoteric utterings which made sense only to his brain, he had dismantled a large part of the washer. I won't tell you what he found as he excavated further and further down into the mechanical guts, but it was pretty foul, and this is from a woman who has changed a lot of nappies.

Eventually, though, he got to the point in the video that said, "And if you're still having problems, you need to stop and call a repairman unless you are REAAAAAAAAAALLY confident in what you're doing." Luckily my hubby knows when to heed an omen, and after an hour's worth of sweating and grunting, he ceded to circumstance. "Guess we'd better look into getting this replaced," he sighed as he washed his hands free of 8 years of food gunk. "Won't be too expensive...machines are cheap."Except they're not. Oh, the machines themselves run from $250 to $1,000 and beyond (machines that I can only assume wash your dishes with the tears of angels then pour you a glass of chablis and offer to work out the kinks in your neck). It's the installation and labour that pulls the money from your eyeballs. The cost of delivery and shoving this new contraption into the wall, taxes, freight, haulage of the old machine out of your house and into the graveyard, customs, donations to the charity of the month, rabies vaccinations, title searching, and whatever else they tack on at the very end wound up costing as much as the unit itself.

In the meantime, we had to wash dishes by hand, and I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining here because I'm not. Yes, it was a little icky to pull the dirty dishes from the dead machine and sandblast the chunks of dried food from them, but once we were past that, I was rather surprised how little time it took to clean the kitchen without the washer

I don't mean to sound thick here because our first house in England, where we lived for five wonderful years, did not have a dishwasher. The only time it became an issue was when Max was born, and we needed to sterilise his bottles. We solved that problem by buying a microwave steriliser, a rather nifty contraption that could clean six bottles at once through the aid of sterliser tablets and boiling water. The other dishes really didn't take that long to wash and even less time to dry.

And here's the really nifty part, the thing I'd forgotten--if you wash dishes by hand, you actually use fewer of them, and you wash them a lot faster. What I've found in the last week is that the dishes I wash don't even make it back into the drawers and cupboards before they get called into action again. Likewise, when we're done with the dishes, they get washed straight away--no food funk adhering in crusty lesions over the course of a day or two as they sit in the washer. No having to wash things twice. No opening the washer 20 minutes before the end of its cycle to let the dishes dry off a little. No taking out still-wet cups and bowls, rinsing them, then chucking them in the drainer to sit for another full day. And no emptying the washer, filling the counter with dishes, putting them away, then loading it back up again, a process I've always found rather demoralising.

In the end, a dishwasher is a machine that can (and will) break down and complicate your life by being kaput. But what I didn't realise is that it also complicates your life by doing exactly what it's meant to do. I timed how long it took me to empty it out and put everything away and re-load vs. washing things by hand and leaving them in the rack to dry. The time I saved without the washer was astounding.

My neighbour back in England, Iris, used to join us for dinner quite often, and afterward as a matter of course, she followed me into the kitchen, grabbed a tea towel, and said, "Right, where shall I start?" When I laughingly made a joke about her paying for her meal by washing dishes, she just looked astounded and said, "But why wouldn't you want to do this? It's such a social thing! Everyone can help out, and you get to chat with your family and the people you love! Why should this be a chore??"

No big revelation here. No statement about simplifying your life to reap rich return. Nothing about how machines are making things so easy for us that we're not connected to the basic elements anymore. Just a rather unexpected surprise that reminded me I'm not done learning yet.