Say your dishwasher breaks.
Say you had started the dishwasher at 4:00 a.m. Saturday morning while you were throwing food at the cats so they would leave you the heck alone and let you sleep.
Say you heave a big sigh at 1:00 p.m., when you just want to eat lunch and then realize you have to empty the dishwasher.
Say you pull out a bowl and find it’s still dirty.
Say you complain for the 47th time about that stupid dishwasher that just doesn’t clean the dishes very well, even though it’s all fancy and sleek and quiet (and your husband picked it out).
Say you pull out another bowl and find there’s actual MOLD growing on it!
Say your husband asks if you’re sure you ran it and you tell him in a most annoyed voice that OF COURSE you ran it because you even turned on the light at 4:00 a.m. so you could see what you were doing.
Say you check the dishwasher and find the detergent cup never opened.
Say you try running it again and hear the “Danger, danger Will Robinson” chimes after a couple minutes and see an error message LE flashing on the control panel.
Say you check the manual (while patting yourself on the back that you know exactly where the manual is), and find out what IE, OE, FE, E1, HE, and TE errors mean, but nothing about LE, which must mean LE is really, really bad.
Say you call the 800 customer service number, and amazingly, someone is there on a Saturday at 1:00 p.m.! Then, “Octavio” (heavy Spanish accent, rather than Indian) tells you that LE means “Locked Engine” and either the motor is shot or there’s a problem in the wiring from the control panel to the motor and it’s nothing that can be fixed over the phone, but here’s the name and number of your local authorized service dealer and is there anything else I can help you with today?
Say your husband simultaneously checks the Web and finds out the same information you did, along with a couple possible fixes and people saying there’s about a 50-50 chance it’s a shot motor or a broken wire.
Say you wash the disgusting dishes in the full-to-the-brim dishwasher by hand (in 6 batches because you don’t have a big drainer or anything because, well, you have a dishwasher).
Say you take the Web posters’ advice and dismantle the dishwasher door to reveal the wiring behind the shiny black cover.
Say you see about 25 colored wires running all throughout the door, one of which may be broken and causing the problem because (a) it got stuck in the black tar-like undercoating “they” sprayed all over the door during manufacturing that melted from the heat of the dishwasher or (b) it repeatedly got pinched under the door during opening/closing.
Say you find a really obvious broken black wire right off the bat, though the helpful folks online report finding breaks in gray, red, or blue wires, but it’s only one end of the black wire, so it seems like just a ground wire or something that was never connected.
Say you spend another hour running back and forth to the computer to check for service manuals and other comments online and painstakingly following the pretty colored wires.
Say you just about convince yourself that it is, in fact, a shot motor, that you can either pay someone a $120+ service call (plus parts) to fix, or you can buy the motor yourself (for $60) and try to install it yourself…which involves disconnecting the dishwasher and taking it out of it’s very tight home in the island and turning it upside down, to start.
Say your husband then notices a black wire melted into the black goo that you both missed seeing for the past hour.
Say your handy husband then splices the broken black wire back together, you reassemble the door, and hope for the best.
Say it now works!!!!!
Should you be happy it only took an hour or two to fix it (thanks to a talented husband and nice people who post fixes on the Web) or annoyed that a 3-year old dishwasher suddenly broke in the first place, delayed your lunch, and caused you a lot of anxiety on a Saturday thinking you were going to have to spend mega dollars to get a repairman out or watch your husband struggle with yet another difficult DIY project and have to do dishes by hand (in batches) in the meantime?
You say I should be happy? Thanks, I thought so.
Being an optimist after you’ve got everything you want doesn’t count.
~ Kin Hubbard
Writing by Ear 