Several weeks ago, while I was out of town, our dishwasher died.
And no, I don’t mean me.
I mean our electric dishwasher, which cuddles up against the sink under the counter in our kitchen.
Now some folks — my sister, for example — would not think this demise a great tragedy. She prefers to hand-wash all her dishes. I guess she finds it therapeutic or something. She also prefers that all her visitors (family members, mostly) wash their own dishes as well, so I guess that cuts down on her hand-washing workload. She only uses the electric dishwasher when she has large crowds of company, like at the holidays or after parties.
We, on the other hand, sometimes use our electric dishwasher twice a day — and we hand-wash some things, to boot! Like my husband’s beloved cast iron skillet. Anyone caught trying to stick that “god of his idolatry” into the electric dishwasher would find themselves not only shunned, disinherited and banished from the house, but possibly shot at dawn — by a firing squad consisting entirely of my husband.
This is not hyperbole. I’m pretty sure that if the house were burning down, he would grab the skillet before running outside. The rest of us, including the dog, would be an afterthought. If we’re lucky.
He hasn’t hit me over the head with it yet, but I’m offering odds.
When our dishwasher died — and it wasn’t that old, by the way, but we had neglected to buy the extended warranty (lesson learned) — we very naturally went looking for a replacement from a local appliance vendor. This would have been on a Thursday. We chose one, and were promised a Saturday delivery.
That didn’t happen. So the following week we called, only to be informed that the delivery had been delayed to the following Wednesday. Which became the following Saturday. Which became the following Tuesday. Which became … well, you get the picture.
You’d have thought they were having to build the thing themselves, or have it shipped in from a Buddhist monastery, where the monks manufacture electric appliances, somewhere in Tibet!
Trying to train our sons to wash their own dishes after dinner or snacks has been a rather difficult enterprise — after all, it’s not something they’ve been called upon to do before, and old habits die hard. They are grown adults, so it is a little difficult to issue orders to them — but after all, they are living under our roof at our expense, so it didn’t seem like too much to ask.
It took a week or so, but they finally caught on, and have been doing fairly well for the last day or so.
Today the dishwasher arrived.
So much for teaching our sons another little lesson on the road to self-sufficiency.
We are pleased to have the thing installed, however — well, we will be; they are actually installing it as I write this. As always, it is a little embarrassing to have outsiders enter our house without giving them a 15-minute disclaimer first.
I would put housekeeping somewhere below horse-shoeing on the list of my skills, and even lower on the list of things I am motivated to do regularly — probably somewhere below caber-tossing. (Look it up.) But these gentlemen are being paid to do a job, and they have very kindly accepted my mortified apologies for having a house that looks like an episode of “Hoarders” (only with far less organization and probably less economic value.) You might notice, however — my husband does — that I’m not mortified enough to change my ways. I just don’t invite people over. That’s why no one but delivery people has seen the inside of our house since about Christmas 2015. Which is not to say that I haven’t cleaned since then. Well, it’s not to say that …
If the delivery men wish to vilify my housekeeping skills (or lack thereof) on their own time, that’s their right. No one is going to hear what they say in the privacy of the delivery van anyway. (I hope.) I wouldn’t blame them. You should hear what my husband says!
It will be lovely having a dishwasher again, after all these weeks. I can’t help feeling that, with all that boiling water and so on, they get a lot cleaner in the machine. But perhaps that is just rationalizing, to excuse the expenditure, and my laziness. Not that it’s been torture to hand-wash the dishes, but it has been inconvenient. I have better things to do with my time.
Like not cleaning the house.