Joe Bennett: Why the dishwasher has become the bane of my life

The beast that calls itself a dishwasher is no such thing.

OPINION

The dishwasher man is coming this afternoon. Now there’s a sentence with a dozen moving parts.

When I say the dishwasher man, I do not mean the man who washes dishes. I mean the man who tends to the machine that washes dishes or rather the machine that has decided to stop washing dishes, which is why the man is coming.

Feed any dishwasher an oven tray with baked-on gunk and it just whimpers and gives up. The tray emerges from the 90-minute washing cycle damp but otherwise unaltered.

In other words, the beast that calls itself a dishwasher is no such thing. It only does the easy bits, the plates and cutlery, the stuff that needs no washing skills at all. And even then it asks that plates be rinsed before it gets them, the bits of food removed. That’s half the washing done before it starts. And my machine cost $1500.

The device is advertised, of course, as labour-saving, but how much labour does it save?

By the time I’ve rinsed the plates and cutlery and glasses, and stacked them all in their appointed places and put a washing tablet in and turned it on, I might as well have done the job myself. And also there’s the labour that I had to do to earn the $1500 to buy the thing. To which I am about to add the labour I have got to do to pay the man to mend it.

The beast went subtly weird. I switched it on last thing at night as usual, but then, when morning came, the dishes still looked soiled. I slipped another tablet in its little cavity and switched it on once more. Lights lit up. It seemed to make the proper noises, filling and then draining. But then part way through the cycle it went mad. I saw it happen. The display said there was 50 minutes left before the cycle ended.

Then suddenly it was 65. I’d just watched time go backwards. The machine had done a Jules Verne. Unnerved I called the dishwasher man.

Or rather I texted him. When two days later he hadn’t texted back I texted him again. I did so nervously. One doesn’t want to seem importunate when the other holds the cards. He came after five days.

His van had difficulty getting up the drive, which didn’t help. I told him all about Jules Verne. Aha, he said, and hmmm and stroked his chin and played around a bit and then he said he didn’t have the parts right now and he’d get back to me and off he went again.

Ten days of nothing whatsoever followed. I soon got used to doing all the dishes for myself by hand, just as my mother did throughout her 90-something years, and her mother before and so on back to Eve, and frankly, well, it wasn’t very hard.

Indeed I’d be quite happy not to have a dishwasher, except that then I’d have a cavity beneath the sink where once the thing had dwelt. I texted him again and he came back to me at last. ‘I’ll be there Tuesday afternoon,’ he said

Well, Tuesday afternoon begins in half an hour, and goes on for another five or six hours after that. Do I know when, in all that time, the man might come to fix the dishwasher? I don’t. Do I have other things I’d like to do this afternoon instead of waiting for a man to come and fix the dishwasher? I do.

The situation, then, is this: that I, an independent adult human being, supposedly autonomous, am stuck at home this afternoon against my will. What I am waiting for is the arrival of a man to mend a dishwasher that he, himself, provided and installed just four short years ago, that cost me lots of money at the time and is about to cost me plenty more, and that I can no longer see the point of using.

And yet when he arrives, assuming that he does, I shall not say, ‘I’m sorry but on second thoughts…’ Instead I’ll thank him fulsomely for making time to do the job I can longer see the point of, and offer him a cup of tea or coffee, then when the job is done I’ll pay him promptly and in full. We are strange creatures.