#61 Dirty Little Secrets

Anne Morse Hambrock

Jun 03, 2024

Pretty much every morning my kitchen sink looks like this.

Because the beautiful stainless steel dishwasher located a scant six inches to its left is just for show.

Number of days in my adult life with a functioning dishwasher: 872.

Number of days without one: 14,823

OK. Those numbers might be a bit off.

But they feel real.

I have owned a total of three dishwashers and I swear each of them has been involved in a plot to undermine my confidence in functioning appliances.

The first unit barely qualified as a dishwasher. It was a portable number given (cough - pawned off on us) by my parents and the highlight of its existence was the time it spent under a decorated bed sheet while holding a table-top Christmas tree up out of the reach of toddlers.

The second machine came with our house and proceeded to function until six days after the home warranty covering all included appliances expired.

Our most recent dishwashing imposter gave us no trouble until, of course, that warranty expired. . After which the beast signaled its impending demise by going haywire for a few cycles and then gave up the ghost.

That was six years ago.

We didn’t fix it.

Partly because the last child was leaving for college and we thought: “What the heck, it’s just the two of us, how many dishes can there be?”

And partly because, when you are paying for college, things like appliance repairs fall into the “Oh, you sweet naïve dear - just where do you think that money is coming from?” category.

So we sucked it up. And bought a lot of Palmolive and sponges.

For a couple of years we used the interior as a large glorified drying rack. It freed up a lot of needed counter space.

Then, Covid.

And we all gathered together in pods and two people’s worth of dishes became four people’s worth of dishes.

This might have been an appropriate time to call a repairman.

Except we weren’t letting any germy people into the house and there weren’t really any fix-it type folks who wanted to come encounter our cooties either.

When, finally, the budget and the end of lockdown lined up, we paid a lovely gentleman rather a hefty sum to visit our kitchen and effect repairs.

We were ecstatic at the return of automated clean-dish bliss.

For approximately four days.

At which time the unit sent out a series of confusing digital messages. Followed by complete radio silence.

We poked it.

We prodded it.

We sang it lullabies.

Nothing.

Back to being a drying rack.

For another two years.

We gave it a last shot at life about three months ago. After a visit by a yet another expensive gentleman, we got one functional washing.

Since then we’ve been treated to a new series of communications where the poor thing seems to think it is trapped in the middle of a cycle and is constantly either blinking like someone with a nervous tick in their eye or signaling that it has 1 or 2 or 5 or 6 hours to go until its hellscape existence might end.

I think it’s in distress.

My husband thinks it’s taunting him with empty promises of dishwashability.

This has become such an irritation for him that I have flirted with the idea of covering the displays with tape.

Better yet.

I just ordered a new one.

Happy Birthday dear.

And…

The pots and pans fairy doesn’t visit much either.

So I beg of you.

If you give me short notice before you visit,

please don’t open my oven.

Next Book - At The Printer!

I’m still collecting pre-orders.

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Remember Those Peonies?

Back in issue #55 I challenged folks to guess which foliage would produce pink peonies and which would produce yellow.

Here you can see the answer. It’s so interesting to me that the first shoots of both varieties are red, then some of them turn green, then everything turns green.

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Anne The Passive Aggressive Poet

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