Owned by the Dishwasher

Today, we were owned by the dishwasher.

It's a Samsung, about 18 months old.  Our primary criterion for getting it was that our old dishwasher - which worked well enough - was noisy; you couldn't hold a telephone conversation in the kitchen while it was running.  Each of us had had the experience of stopping the dishwasher to have a telephone conversation, and discovering it still stopped only when we went to it, wondering why it hadn't finished yet.

So the new one had to be quiet.  Outside of that, we really didn't care.  Had a gentle cycle for crystal? We don't have all that much crystal and china, but, sure, that's nice.  Delay wash? Well, heck, don't they all?  (Answer: no.) The upper rack could be raised and lowered, so that large things could go in either location?  Okay, that's nice.

Which I suspect is when the people from Samsung chuckled.  Because they knew. 

To raise or lower the rack, you press in on two handles, one on either side of the rack.  About two weeks ago, my wife said that one of the handles was not working, and as a result, she couldn't raise the rack.  Of course, I immediately thought duct tape, but being the reasonable person that I like to pretend I am, I looked into it.  Ten bucks for the part.  Ten bucks for the shipping.  It arrived, and my wife promptly installed it.  Snapped right into place.  Aha, we said, gloating, no service charge!

We really shouldn't have done that.

A few weeks before, my wife had noted that one of the six plastic tabs that hold those handles in place had broken off.  The handle was still firmly attached though, so we thought nothing of it.  After we ordered the new part, she said maybe we should replace that other one, some day.  After all, that tab came off. Yeah. Some day.

About two weeks ago, we noticed that the dishwasher seemed....louder than before.  Not all the time, just occasionally.  Usually it seemed to coincide when water was being pumped in or drained out. After a while, we decided that we should have it looked at.  So today, a serviceman showed up.  I started the dishwasher.  He nodded and opened the door.  Nodded again.  One of those tabs snapped off, he said. Sounds like it fell into the pump.  That sound is the plastic tab getting ground up.  Huh.  How much to fix it?  One hundred sixty four dollars.  Ouch.  Can we live with it?  Sure.  But you should know that the impeller on the pump is also plastic.  So every time it's grinding down that tab, it's getting ground down, too.  And  a new pump costs three hundred dollars.

We had him open it up, pull the tab from the pump, seal it up.

Never mock the gods of service.  Today, they, through their minion, our dishwasher, owned us.