The highlight reel advances from the ceiling fan last week to the kitchen yesterday morning, where Karen is calling to me: “Michael, can you come in here for a minute?”
I am in the bedroom, dressing, in a bit of a hurry. But her tone is beckoning. Not alarmed, or hysterical, so I know it’s not a spider or a snake. It says, “No need to call 911, but there’s something in here that you really need to see, right now.” I drop my pants, walk down the hall and into the kitchen and there is Karen, standing over a dishwasher that is about one-third full of soap suds. Tongues of suds have trickled out at the corners and are spreading alluvially onto the floor. It looks like a dishwasher with rabies.
I hate this. I have had some success as a handyman in my homeowning history, but sick dishwashers are unapproachable by amateurs. You put dishes and soap in, close the door, turn it on, and behind the closed door things of unimaginable wisdom occur until the hissing stops, you open the door, and the dishes are clean. There is only one thing I know to do, before we call the appliance people. “It could be the drain is blocked,” I say.
She tells me that in fact she had found a cap loose in the bottom of the washer. It is the cap that screws into the opening of a reservoir in the door that holds a kind of rinsing product. Years ago I poured some of this rinsing product, called Jet Dry, into the reservoir and have not thought about it again since. Karen has now screwed the cap back into the opening, but the machine is not draining. I have another thought. “You were washing pots and pans in the sink while the machine was running,” I say, starting to glow with brilliance. “Maybe the volume was too much for the drain.” Karen closes the door, starts the machine, soap pours out. I shrug.
“Call the plumber,” I say, and head off up the hall. Then Karen says, “Oh no!” in a stricken sort of way that brings me back. She is standing in front of the open sink cabinet, a bottle of Dawn Dishwashing Soap in one hand, a bottle of Jet Dry in the other. They are very similar. She doesn’t have to speak; I can reconstruct the truth. Loading the washer, she finds the cap, decides to fill the reservoir, but instead of Jet Dry she has poured in a three-month supply of Dawn Dishwashing Soap. I ache with empathy for her. This is what I call an Ancillary Dilemma, when an act meant to correct some situation in fact turns it into a completely different situation that is geometrically more complex than the original. I have dozens of Ancillary Dilemmas in my handyman record. Once again, as with the ceiling fan, I feel a bit of pride stirring, this time for Karen standing there with the two bottles in her hands. As Ancillary Dilemmas go, this one is pretty good.
So good, in fact, that it resists Googling. “Wrong soap in dishwasher” yields 1,270,000 results, so common as to be plebian. From the dishwasher manual (which I recommended), she discovers that the reservoir is called simply the “rinse agent.” For historical purposes, I undertake this search myself. “Wrong soap in rinse agent” yields no results at all, but invites a further search of wrong soap in rinse agents “without quotes.” That search yields 234,000 results, with this caveat at the bottom of the first page: “Tip: these results do not include the word ‘wrong.’ Show results that include ‘wrong’.” That search yields 12,000 results, including a link to WikiAnswers, which provides this solution:
“Take the door apart and remove the jet dry reservoir. Thoroughly rinse out the reservoir, then put everything back together.” Right. This is the same as a recipe for hamburgers that begins, “Go out and kill a cow.” The appliance repair people are coming tomorrow. Though you would think that a human who can navigate himself through Google to get to a WikiAnswer for “Wrong soap in rinse agent” should be able to find his way through a dishwasher door. There are some truths that just don’t make sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment