Dishwasher Purchase, Chapter 2 :-)

Hey! Despite all the concern about whether my dinnerware will fit in the bottom rack of the budget-busting new dishwasher, lo! Those gigantic plates fit just FINE. That the tines are closer together means they stand up straighter, take up less space, and so the machine can hold MANY more dishes than the Late Lamented Unit did.

Not only that, but somehow Bosch has managed to redesign the top rack so that — mirabilis! — it holds the wine glasses!! Not only holds them, but holds them with plenty of room to spare!

The old one wouldn’t hold them upright (so they always gathered hard-water spots where water pooled near the rim and on the bottom of the foot), and the fit was so tight that when you closed the top rack they’d sometimes fall over. So there’s a pain in the tuchus that no longer applies.

What a freaking day. You’d think that waiting around for a repairman to show up would be fairly dull, wouldn’t you? Ah, but that’s in real life. The Funny Farm exists in a universe parallel to but slightly out of whack with the Real World.

To start with, certain food items were running low. So I had to make a run on the grocery store, an expedition from where I am.

Then, it’s been so long since I cleaned house that the entire shack lay beneath a layer of litter and debris. Bills were unpaid (most of them still are, as we scribble). The calendar was under a pile of loose papers, so if I was supposed to do anything I had no idea what it might be. Trash was strewn across the dining table, the desks, the floor in the TV room. It had been so long since I’d changed the sheets that Cassie and I were beginning to get nervous about climbing onto the bed. Cassie’s dog-hair-catching bed blanket was white with shed fur. Ugh.

So this morning I had to throw myself around to get through this stuff before InstallerMan showed up.

Meanwhile, I’d fobbed the Chinese Statistico-Psychological Study onto Tina, officially the Associate Editor here at The Copyeditor’s Desk. She had read through it, found a pile of stuff I’d missed and dreamed up some new issues that needed to be fixed, and sent it back. So I needed to finish reading 80 exceptionally opaque pages and do it now, since we are way, way, way, way late in returning this thing to the client.

Fortunately, Client is busying herself with applying for post-docs, a chore that, you can bet, is distracting her attention nicely from our shortcomings.

Hours pass. Hours filled with mind-numbing ditz. Hours filled with batsh!t CHAOS.

InstallerMan, scheduled to show up between 1 and 5, surfaces closer to 1 than to 5. When he phones to announce his advent, he asks me to empty all the junk out from under the sink.

Ducky. I’m in the middle of this complicated, damn near incomprehensible project and now I’ve got to drop everything, get down on hands and knees, and shovel out the freaking kitchen cabinetry!

Luckily, rather little is under there, so it’s not that big a deal. Except that the interruption is annoying.

Back to work. Twenty minutes later, the guy shows up and Cassie greets him with a yapfest. I let him in, move my car, and open the garage door so he can get the contraption into the house with the least possible hassle. Then it’s back to the laptop, trying to get through the Chinglish.

Cassie can’t stand it. She launches into a new yapping frenzy about every three to five minutes. I’m constantly having to quiet her down, and even if I try to ignore her ear-splitting barks, I can not concentrate on this stuff while she’s carrying on and the workman is tromping back and forth.

It takes him an hour or so to get the dishwasher in. During that time, unknown to me he tries to shut off the water to the house — the clothes washer is full of sheets and this will cause God only knows what to happen to THAT pricey contraption; if he’d said something I would’ve gotten up and shut off the washer. The main valve leaks, so, afraid he won’t be able to stop that, he shuts it off, comes into the house, and shuts off the water at the valve under the sink. That leaks, too.

He asks for a bowl so as not to flood the kitchen. I can see we’ll be calling the plumber soon, another gerzillion bucks down the drain.

He manages to get the machine installed. The leak stops. I wish him a happy Thanksgiving, wave good-bye, move the car back into the garage, and race back to the computer.

Finally, finally, finally I arrive at the end of this exercise. A moment of extraordinary good luck occurs: I hit “save” before doing the file conversions I wished to do, and I cleverly saved the project to DropBox.

Can you not see what’s coming?

But of course. When I tried to produce clean copy containing only notes & queries, Word instantly hung.

And it stayed hung. Permanently.

Fukkaroonies.

Trudge into the office, get onto the giant iMac. Save and close every open Wyrd file, of which there were a-plenty (multi-tasking is what I do instead of breathing). Surprisingly, find the saved file in DropBox — something has been saved, anyway.

Persuade file to open — another surprise. Search for the most recent changes…find them. Another surprise. Rename and save to a new directory. It works. Apparently the file has not corrupted. These miracles may never cease.

The big computer compliantly manipulated the damn file as desired and I shipped it off to the client.

Thank heaven for DropBox! If that file had resided on the laptop, I would’ve been SOL.

Anyway, the thing is now mailed to Shanghai; next, the bookkeeping. But first: dinner.

Putting the cleaning gear back under the sink, what should I find but that this connection box thing — very clearly an electrical connection for the machine’s power cord — is laying on the floor of the cabinet, right next to where the cut-off valve allegedly is leaking. It has little holes drilled in its frame — evidently it’s intended to be bolted to a vertical surface. Instead, it’s laying on a surface prone to flooding with leaking water.

Electric box…meet water. Water…meet electric box.

Helle’s Belles. Now I’ll have to call the plumber first thing Monday. Like I haven’t already bankrupted myself!

Image: Open Dishwasher Loaded with Dishes. Carlos Paes. Public domain.