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Dishwasher fix-it video a washout

4 min read

The dishwasher has been useless for going on three weeks now, its control panel goading me with two blinking green lights.

“First check the circuit breaker,” said the repair guy on YouTube. I did that, wandering out to the garage in my bare feet with a flashlight. Pushed the switch to the right, counted to 30, and then pushed it back to the left. Nothing.

“Next, look for the reset button,” the YouTube man said, but I couldn’t find the dang thing. The video showed the guy hunched on the kitchen floor, working beneath the dishwasher. But in my kitchen, that’s where the millipede was living, and I’m not going under there.

A call to three service places got me an appointment no closer than the end of September. And so, for the first time in probably 40 years, I’ve got dishpan hands.

It’s weird how something sensory like hot soapy water up to the elbows can send you right back – in my case, to my early childhood, when my sisters and I took turns doing the dishes. I would stand on a chair as I sloshed bubbles into plastic drinking cups with a dish cloth held in a hand tucked into a rubber glove four sizes too large. There was no way to keep the water out.

One of us would clear the table, one of us would wash, and one of us would dry. On the rare occasion when someone would ask my mom if we had a dishwasher, she would answer, “I’ve got three of them.”

My parents have been married a long time, and they still don’t have an automatic dishwasher. My mom, a talented and prolific baker, says she uses her bakeware so often that she has to wash it by hand anyway, because she doesn’t want to wait for a dishwasher cycle to run its course. But I suspect her aversion has something to do with not trusting what happens in there when she shuts and locks the dishwasher door.

In these weeks without the machine, I’ve come to not exactly hate washing by hand. There’s something warmly soothing about having my hands in the warm water. The first week, I placed the clean and wet dishes on the granite countertop, but then a wine glass crashed to the floor. Turns out an upended glass will skate across a smooth, wet surface and tumble like a hapless Olympian. I bought a drying rack.

There’s not much that’s ever drying on it, really. Maybe two dishes, a coffee mug and three glasses per day. It’s only Smoothie and me here, and neither of us cooks or eats much, so doing the dishes doesn’t take much time.

And yet, there was always something satisfying about opening the dishwasher first thing every morning, grabbing a sparkly glass for my morning hydration and reaching toward the back for a clean coffee mug. I miss that perfect, sanitized clean. My hand-washed dishes don’t look like that in the morning – although maybe yours do. Maybe I don’t rinse well enough.

And maybe there’s a lesson in all of this – that we really don’t need as much technology or automation as the world tells us we need. Sometimes, the old way is good enough.

In my case, the lesson might be that fix-it videos on YouTube are only helpful for those of us who are already somewhat mechanically inclined (and not afraid of bugs). I watched that video three times, poked around the control panel a lot, and still the lights wouldn’t stop blinking at me.

The repair man is scheduled for early October.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.

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