Fixing My Dishwasher, Signifying Nothing

Yesterday I tried to fix my dishwasher and it wasn’t a metaphor. It was just a dishwasher that no longer drained that I decided to fix myself, unable to handle waiting several days for building maintenance while the puddle of rancid water at the bottom of the machine just sat there in the heat wave, signifying absolutely nothing. 

Sometimes things just break. Sometimes the authority figures we depend upon fail to answer the call, and so it falls to us to perform the difficult and disgusting labors at hand. It’s just how it goes, there’s an unforeseen accumulation of rot in your own home. I’m talking about the bits of scrambled eggs and lint I pulled out my Frigidare and nothing more, nothing more. 

With the guidance of a YouTube tutorial made by a dad named Jonah, I began to dismantle the machine. Out comes the rack of dirty dishes, out comes the standing water. Jonah uses a shop vac but all I have is a plastic cup and stainless steel ladle I once used to cook soups and sauces, but now has been deployed to bailout the crevices of the dishwasher. The repurposed ladle is not metonymic, Jonah does not remind me of my own father—a good man in a storm whom I’m three thousand miles away from. Unburdened of ulterior meaning, I unclip the dishwasher’s plastic propeller, twist the tab on the basket screen from the three o’clock position to six o’clock (see, time still has meaning is a joke I don’t make to myself), remove the large circular matting to reveal moldy lint, broken glass, a can tab, rancid flakes of spinach and cilantro, wet cat food, hair. “I wonder, how does hair get in our dishwasher?” asks Jonah as he investigates the mess inside his own unit. I too wonder, am I up to this task, will I even be able to put this thing back together now that it’s been taken apart, what happens if I fail, what will life even look like on the other side of this ordeal? By which of course I mean, I wonder if I have the right torque screwdriver I need for the next step? Luckily, for once in my goddamn fucking life I’m prepared. Out come the screws. 

So I take out all the individual plastic pieces and scrub them clean of congealed food and lint. I reassemble and test the dishwasher, and once again, it fills with water. So what’s there to do but get back on my knees with my ladle and bail it all out again, remove the parts, keep following Jonah’s advice because someone has to know what’s going on. My fingers are pruned, I’ve stripped down to my underwear, and I pour baking soda and vinegar and boiling water into the dishwasher’s basin, you know, that cliche of an erupting volcano at a school science fair. I don’t think about the next time we’ll have school science fairs because I’m thinking about my dishwasher, which after another test, is still clogged. “Uh oh, looks like I’ve failed again, for the second time,” says Jonah. “Wow, I can’t believe it.” 

But I am far beyond disbelief, Jonah. In fact, I am already back on my knees with the ladle, the tears streaming down my face caused solely by the steam and vinegar. Next we head under the sink and dismantle the tubing and piping. It’s always a bit of a shock to really get eyes on the shoddiness of ones living conditions. I pay the Monem Corporation almost 2,000 dollars a month for this one bedroom, so I suppose I was expecting more than jagged raw plywood, leaky pipes, and an unbothered cockroach under my sink, but then again, what do I expect from a company that manages more than sixty buildings in LA and just sent us all a reminder that residents are still required to pay rent, adding that we shouldn’t let “rumors on this subject put you in a bad place—we have a good understanding of what the governor has instituted, and many are already interpreting this very incorrectly and needlessly putting themselves in worse predicaments than they had to.” There’s certainly no meaning to extract from that strange threat, no rumors of a rent strike, no corporate threats of backlash, certainly not, nothing to see here. I remove the drainage tubes, spraying myself with trash water.  

I envy Jonah, who found the unequivocal culprit in his plumbing—a build up of calcium and soap that he cleans out with a wire brush. “And look at that! Hallelujah. It worked,” he declares. “We have finally fixed our problem.” If only it were that simple, if only the cause of all our problems was singular and identifiable, not a systemic meltdown but a little bit of hardened soap. I take everything apart again, I clean it all piece by piece, I let the cockroach live, I reassemble the machine, I test it one more time. 

“Apophenia” describes a weakness built into human cognition—our impulse to identify patterns in chaos, interpret our delusions as revelation, and experience the false epiphany of interconnectedness. This glitch in the machine of our brains explains our propensity towards conspiracy theories, belief in the paranormal, and habit of magical thinking. In the words of psychologist Peter Brugger, the man who first identified apophenia, humans are highly susceptible to be overwhelmed by an "unmotivated seeing of connections." 

Now it is true that I was overwhelmed, deeply, when I heard the water finally draining from my dishwasher, a sound like angels on high, the gurgling water the first good news I’ve heard in weeks. But like I keep saying, sometimes a dishwasher is just a dishwasher. Allow me to rest in the knowledge that I was able to fix this one broken thing.