A Road Less Travelled

I have decided that I quite like washing dishes by hand once in a while. It’s a good thing I decided this because our dishwasher is broken.

I was woken up on Tuesday morning by Isaac knocking on my door and asking what the sign on the dishwasher that said “Do Not Run Dishwasher” meant. I was probably not as eloquent as I would be after I’d been awake for a bit and had had a cup of coffee, but I’m sure I managed to express myself well enough. I said, “What?”

It turns out that Seth and Crystal had come back from their date the night before to find the dishwasher running dry and part of the basement flooded. It was Crystal who put the succinct yet, to Isaac, confusing sign on the dishwasher door. So on Tuesday Crystal and I set about trying to fix the leak.

A dishwasher is a really odd device. It’s got these parts that all stack on each other, but the one on top has to slide under something sticking out of the one on the bottom. And the thing everything screws into rotates so if you don’t have all eleven screw holes perfectly lined up you are in a world of frustration. Added to this was the dishwasher door which I normally have no issue with. Really, in every other interaction with the dishwasher the door and I have gotten along fine. But we didn’t know how to take it off so Crystal and I were both working from the side at several ridiculous angles.

So we took it apart and discovered a filthy mess that seemed to consist of food particles, unused detergent and hard water build-up. I bet if we had left it there any longer it either would have fossilized or become sentient. We cleaned this all out and did the thing with the thing and then we put it back together and tested it out. No dice. It still leaked, though far less than it used to. So now Crystal is thinking that a new gasket is in order.

She goes out, does an entire week’s worth of grocery shopping, buys a gasket and after dinner we tackle the dishwasher again. It’s much easier this time, but still annoying and uncomfortable. We get the new gasket in, we put everything back together, we turn the dishwasher on and, wouldn’t you know, it’s still leaking. It’s dripping instead of pouring, but that’s not good enough to run with.

So now I get to wash dishes for a while. Crystal is shopping around for a new dishwasher because finding out precisely what’s wrong with this one and fixing it would probably be more expensive than getting a new one. It’s ironic, we never had any problems with this dishwasher all the while the Lansberrys were having issue after issue with theirs. Their dishwasher just got a major fix on Monday which is the same day our did its Niagara Falls impersonation. Seems rather convenient to me.