Caveat: part three

Caveat five: never assume.

            You finally call the appliance repair guy because now your stove, your fridge AND your dishwasher are all crashing.  He’s a nice repair guy and comes out the very next day.  You have, of course, put off calling which is why the sink and counters are full of dirty dishes and the fridge shelves are covered with ice.

 No dishwasher. Chaz with mono.  Not a good thing.

First he looks at the oven.  You explain: when you do the self-clean, the oven locks itself, then starts to heat up.  Before, it would heat to maybe 650-700.  Once everything inside was nuked, it’d shut itself off.  But last two tries (the second try because we forgot the try before), it locked itself and proceeded to heat up WAY past 650, WAY past the everything’s ash-point with no shut off in sight.  You outline your subsequent scramble to trick the thing into disengage and unlocking which, you recall, might have involved throwing the breaker.

He solves the problem: do not use the self clean.  Self clean should never have been invented.  It wrecks the paint on the inside and melts the clock from behind.  So don’t use it.

For this fix: no charge.

He diagnoses the dishwasher: clogged up spinner arms and a clogged filter.  Turns out you CAN’T stick an entire cake in one of these dishwashers and find no trace of it after a wash cycle.  Arms are no longer spinning because the water-power is thwarted by old broccoli fibers and other assorted bits of cellulose.  For this, he orders parts and will be back next week.  Charge?  About $180 in the end.  In the meantime, dishes are done by hand.  (By hand?  Really?)  Your husband comes up with a brilliant plan: he uses the dishwasher as a drying rack.

The fridge:  I am switching person now, because there is a personal note to be made: it was my insurance agent, who is, in fact, my friend on Facebook and who has watched over my family for decades (Kim Schroeppel – best agent EVER – Multiserve http://yellowpages.heraldextra.com/multi+serve+insurance+agency.9.10300193p.home.html) who figured out what was wrong with the dang machine – or her husband did:

If you find water inside your fridge and if everything from lettuce and strawberries to milk and left over Mexican food suddenly freezes in there, here is your problem: your drain is clogged.  She told me, you take out the crisper drawers and find the drain and you clean it out and – Ta-DA!! Problem solved.

Except, when I pulled out the drawers, there was  no drain.  Just a fairly yucky pond of water.

Aha, says the repairman.

Kim was right.

Repairman Ben poks around the entire fridge/freezer, looking for the drain.  He opens the control box in the back of the fridge and a miniature Niagra comes gushing out of the electrical wiring box.  This does not seem like a good thing.  We unload the entire freezer (how long has THAT been in here, and what, exactly is it?) so he can take out the removable panel (there’s a removable panel?) at the very back (how convenient!). This is a mite problematic considering the fact that all the counters are already overflowing with mono-coated dirty dishes. In the end we find that, since the fridge is a piece of very modern and advanced technology, its unsightly drain has been put on the OUTSIDE of the appliance, at THE BACK of the dang thing.  Which means that, if you have to get to it, you either install some attractive cabinet door on the wall of the living room, or you have to pull the entire fridge out of the surrounding built in cabinets, across the funky soft pinewood floor.

I was afraid of what I was going to see once we pulled the thing out.  I’d done a little drain hunting myself before Ben showed up (Pioneer Appliance – right on time to the second): me on my stomach with a flashlight, prying off the nasty black grate at the bottom of the front of the fridge – me starting away in alarm and disgust at the furry things seemingly growing on the coils underneath the thing.

Took me a good half an hour to clean the floor we finally exposed.  Who could have known we were such disgusting slobs?  But Ben had found the drain, removed it, schlepped it outside.  He blew the thing out with the garden hose – and a small black mass shot out into the grass.  “There’s your problem,” he said. 

Ewww.

The charge for all this?  “Just the coming-out-to-see charge,” he said.  About $80.  To be paid when all the parts had come in and the dishwasher was alive again.

It took me the better part of half an hour to get all the food back into the fridge and freezer.  “You’re sure it’s plugged in?” I asked G before we shoved it back into its place.  But I knew it was; I’d looked myself.  Chapter closed.

The next day brought us the Great Colt Canyon Ride, a completely spontaneous burning off of an entire Saturday.  As I put the horses away, Chaz called.  When I expressed my apologies about having left home, hearth and family for the whole dang day, she had a great brainstorm: make it up to dad by stopping at the store on the way home (me in my horse-jeans that by now are standing up in the saddle all by themselves) and picking up some chocolate ice cream.  G had had a craving for some, it seems, and the stuff we already had, almost a full tub, had somehow turned into chocolate milk.

In fact, everything in the freezer had pretty much turned into chocolate milk.

Because nobody had actually turned the freezer and fridge BACK ON.  There’s a SWITCH for that?  Why didn’t somebody tell me we’d actually turned them OFF? All I could think of was my hidden tub of Lime Sherbet (hint: the perfect summer lunch after a morning in the hot arena?  Lime Sherbet floating in peach Fresca).

So when the guy comes to your house?  No matter how nice he is – CHECK UP on him.  Or spend the next several weeks trying to figure out if what you just ate is tasting just a little funny.

It was Tuesday before Ben came back with the parts.  The dishwasher is now happily chugging away in the kitchen, and the mono dishes are sterilized.  The cost for the entire thing?  $140.  Evidently, turning the fridge back on is supposed to be part of the service.

So, life could be worse.