GOD DAMN IT!!!!!!!!!!! And yes, that is exactly the language elicited EVERY EFFING TIME I have to use the spectacularly expensive fancy energy-saving water-saving GOD DAMNED Samsung clothes washer I stupidly purchased.
Oh, how I wish I’d bought one of the last agitator washers on the floor at Sears that day. I hate this machine more than I’ve ever hated any piece of junk foisted on me by an American retailer. And those worthies have done more than their share of junk-foisting.
Runner-up: the infuriating, STINKING, ridiculously overpriced Bosch dishwasher that is still grinding away in the kitchen as I try to repair the damage done by the accursed Samsung.
As I’ve no doubt mentioned before, the Samsung top-loader (which I purchased because I can remember my mother’s Bendix and no, I do not CARE how much power and water the damn thing supposedly saves I AM NOT GOING TO BEND OVER AND PUT MY BACK OUT TO HAUL MOUNTAINS OF WET LAUNDRY IN AND OUT OF A WASHER) wads up my clothes into actual, real BRAIDS.
In an effort to prevent this, I purchased a passel of mesh bags. Every time I do the wash, I have to package EVERY STITCH of clothing in these stupid bags. This has the following results:
1) Clothing jammed into the bags comes out wrinkled and wadded up under the best of conditions.
2) This means I have to waste energy running them through the dryer, when in fact most of them could be hung dry (and always WERE hung to dry before I got this effing washer), to much better effect, with exactly zero energy consumption, and with much less hassle.
3) The bags tear open in the wash cycle, or, more routinely, the zippers work their way open during the cycle. The clothing that slips its way partway out of the bag ends up braiding itself around other bags. This creates an ungodly mess to have to untangle, and it stretches, wads, and damages my clothing.
4) The bags themselves wrap themselves around each other. Once again, an ungodly mess that can take ten minutes to unwrap, with the result of damaged, wadded, stretched, WRECKED clothing.
This week I had the bright idea that I could stop at least some of the clothing escape by using safety pins to secure the effing mesh bags shut.
Bet you can guess what happened, cantcha? Yes, clean-up DID entail the use of a wire-cutter…
The damned safety pins wound their way into the mesh. To get the things apart and open bags, I had to cut apart two of the pins.
A third safety pin yanked the zipper pull loose. So I had to take a pair of scissors and hack apart the only bag I’ve found that will hold a pair of jeans.
To accomplish these miracles, the Samsung takes A HUNDRED AND TEN MINUTES to run a load of laundry on the only cycle that disgorges enough water to get the clothing or sheets wet through!!! At five-thirty this morning the dog awoke me by barfing on the bed. So instead of two loads of laundry to do, I had three, one of them now dedicated to laundering the comforter.
Think of that: FIVE YOURS AND THIRTY MINUTES (110/60 = 1.83 hours; 1.83 hours x 3 loads = 5.5 hours!!!!!) to do what used to be and, goddamn it, still should be three twenty-minute loads!
I have GOT to get rid of this thing. Does anybody know of a washer brand that doesn’t do this?
Yes. Then we have the effing Bosch dishwasher in all its highly efficient glory. When I said it stinks, I’m not kidding.
Of late, I’ve noticed an odd, musky, rather unpleasant smell in the house.
I thought it was the dogs. The cleaning lady and I scrubbed the floors; I laundered everything in sight.
The odor persisted. I thought maybe it had something to do with the surgery and my being sick. Or something. Finally, I realized the aroma was strongest in the kitchen.
Yea, verily, it was emanating from the dishwasher. Come to think of it, all the “clean” dishes in the washer reeked faintly of the same stench.
Pulled out the racks and dismantled the lower arm, filter, and drain assembly.
Uh HUH! The filters were pretty dirty all right. That must be it.
Scrubbed out the filter, cleaned everything around there. Reassembled the dishwasher.
Made a run on the hardware store, where I bought a container of that high-powered dishwasher cleaner, the stuff that comes in the plastic bottle with the wax plug that you place upside-down in the utensil rack. That stuff is extremely good, and alarmingly powerful. Ran it through the washer.
It worked adequately. The washer no longer stank to high heaven.
A week or so later — that would be this very morning — I smelled the Smell again.
Once again discombobulated the washer. This time I found not a lot of gunk in the filter, but it was greasy. Very greasy.
I don’t put my dishes into the washer dirty, but neither do I wash them before dropping them in there. You shouldn’t have to. Remember the KitchenAid of yore? NO ONE PREWASHED DISHES before “washing” them in an electric dishwasher, not since about 1952! I normally will scrape the dishes and then take a paper towel and wipe off any grease or sauce before putting them in the washer. But really, you shouldn’t even have to do that.
So it looks like I’m going to have to go back to pouring vinegar into the dishwasher before running a cycle, something I did for two or three years to get the limping old Kenmore to keep getting the dishes clean despite hard water and mechanical senility.
This morning I scrubbed down the washer’s innards again, recombobulated the thing, poured in two cups of Target’s cheapest white vinegar, and ran the thing on the “sanitize” cycle.
This cycle a) sucks up electricity for well over two hours! and b) puts the lie to Bosch’s bragging about the quietness of its wondrous machines.
It seems to have worked, though. I can’t smell the stink.
Probably, like a wonderful new-fangled front-loading super-efficient clothes washer, this thing needs to be left open when not in use in order to keep it from stinking. Won’t that be attractive?
European dishwashers, unlike American products, do not have a “dry” cycle — that is, one way they save energy is by not blowing hot air over the dishes to get them dry. The result is that when the washer turns off, the dishes sitting in there are WET.
You have to remember to open and empty the bottom rack first; otherwise if you pull out the top rack to get something you need, you SPLASH ALL THE DISHES ON THE BOTTOM RACK WITH WATER.
This is a relatively minor annoyance — or at least, it was, when Bosch was a great dishwasher. That seems to have changed with the new annoying generation of electronically enhanced machinery.
I should’ve bought the Kenmore. Just because a bunch of former Sears customers complained that the damn things set fire to their kitchens, was that REALLY a good reason not to buy a Kenmore instead of a Bosch? What are your choices, anyway? You can be burned out of the kitchen or stunk out of the kitchen.
Okay. Enough. I am going off now to wash the rest of the laundry by hand (which will take me all of ten minutes) and hang it up to dry. Have a nice day. Goddamnit.
