Monthly Archives: August 2020

Don’t Do It Yourself

A friend, and a friend of my wife, managed to persuade me to have a crack at fixing our broken dishwasher rather than just fork-out the stupid amount of money required for a new one.

This all happened on Facebook of course.

This all happened when I’d had a few drinks of course.

This was my debrief:

Right, you bastards, the dishwasher is fixed. I have you to thank for encouraging me to try and fix it myself. I fixed the fucker…but it bloody nearly killed me in the process. I said I’d keep you appraised of the progress and so this is your punishment.

The $130 pump arrived and, in a fit of optimistic excitement, I rushed home whilst watching the clear and concise video that explains how to fit the part. I watched it enough times that I had every detail memorized and so with excitement I assembled tools and attacked the machine (power off at the circuit breaker).

There were several things they omitted to describe in the video. The main ones were:

1> The state of the floor under the dishwasher.

2> The state of the cupboard containing the water feed and the waste pipe.

3> The fact that the person who made the holes for the water pipe and waste pipe could well have been a lunatic.

4> You would have to lie on the floor to detach the water pipe and disconnect the electricity through a two inch gap at the base of the machine.

5> Water, water everywhere. Where does it all come from?

So, I spent a while lying on the floor of the kitchen, in a bizarrely large pool of water, trying to undo things though a tiny gap that the spanner and screwdriver were unable to work with no matter what angles I managed to force them into.

Meanwhile, the piles and piles of mouse shit that had built up underneath the dishwasher were liberated by the extraordinary amount of water that was mysteriously present, and turned the puddle I was lying in, into shit soup. But I persisted.

Oh yes, it was in the 90’s that day, and the A/C unit in the front room was not helping.

After an exhausting and humiliating amount of time lying in the soup-du-merde with sweat pouring down my face, I eventually got the machine out, replaced the pump, hoovered up as much mouse shit as I could, replaced the machine, replaced the water supply, replaced the waste pipe, and reconnected the juice – every action taking 3 times as long as it should have done because of fucking dishwasher/foor topology. I was soaked in a variety of unpleasant fluids, exhausted, in pain, but at least I’d replaced the part. I turned the juice back on, turned on the stop cock and started the machine… water ran in but the noise was different.

I settled back into the shit soup and shone a flashlight underneath my nemesis. Water was leaking out from the back of the machine.

There was a lot of screaming and swearing. After pumping out the machine and disabling it, I took a shower/hair-wash, replaced my clothes and sat in the front room shivering with horror, rage and humiliation.At that point I decided that for the rest of my life, I wanted nothing but enough money to make sure I NEVER have to deal with a broken dishwasher ever again. It was trauma.

To cut an already long story short, a week later I decided to have another crack at it, with the idea that a failure would give me the opportunity to destroy the beast in an unnecessarily vicious and humiliating way. But this time it worked. I think I’d put the pump in the wrong way round or something last time. It all seems to be working now.

Despite the aggro, I spent less on the spare part that I would have done on the installation of a new machine alone, so it ain’t all bad.