Turkey and Trouble

Here’s a question for all my readers:  what’s the one day that Americans will make the most homemade food and create the most dirty dishes of any day in the year?  Wait for it…Thanksgiving!  Good, the second questions is:  what would be the most inconvenient day for the dishwasher to break?

You guessed it.  Throughout the preparations yesterday we ran the dishwasher only to find hot dirty dishes still sitting in there.  After dinner when we began bringing mountains of plates and flatware into the kitchen, I decided to go peek in the crawlspace to see if water was pouring out of the floor under the dishwasher.  Why yes, yes, it was.  I think I must’ve jinxed myself by writing about how much I loved the crawlspace.  While everyone else got to eat pie and relax in the dining room, I got to squat in the mud in the crawlspace and attempt to diagnose and fix the dishwasher.  The previous owner must’ve fancied himself a bit of a handyman.  Uh huh.  A handyman with an anti-establishment streak.  Where the rest of the world plumbs a dishwasher into the kitchen sink so if there’s a backup, you can clean it through the sink, Mr. Anti-Establishment bucks the trend!  He hooks up the dishwasher straight to the waste line!  Want to baffle repairmen and vex future homeowners?

After an hour when I managed to unclog the line and reattach everything, I was ready for a celebratory jig.  POW!  That’s when fate struck a cruel blow.  Down in the crawlspace, I shouted for my wife to switch on the machine.  Voila!  No water backing up from the waste line.  Except there was still water pouring out from under the machine.  Hang on, what’s this exploded looking piece of plastic?  Turns out that dishwashers, bear with me here, clean food off dishes.  Amazing!  And that food will sometimes get clogged up in a waste line.  And why does the rest of the world hook up dishwashers to the kitchen sink with an air gap?  If there’s a clogged line, the water pressure won’t explode some plastic doohickey in the dishwasher.  But if you’re Mr. Anti-Establishment and you plumb the dishwasher straight into the waste line, when it clogs, it’s like Bugs Bunny putting his finger in the end of Elmer Fudd’s gun:  the pressure builds up and BANG!  The rifle barrel opens like a banana peel.

So.  We’ll be joining the Black Friday throngs in search of a new dishwasher.  And we’ll be calling a Pro-Establishment plumber to set up our dishwasher correctly.  And I will reiterate how much I love going into the beautiful and cozy crawlspace, in the hopes of never having to go down there again.

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Writer, architect, father, husband.