On The Level

Our dishwasher has been on fritz lately. I found an appliance repairman who came out and replaced the fill value. Unfortunately, that only fixed the problem for a couple of days. The repairman sent his apprentice back out to take another look at the dishwasher. Tagging along with the apprentice was another guy who looked to be about 80 years old. The older guy was quite frail and his breathing was labored even when he was laying down on the floor of our kitchen looking underneath the dishwasher (the pack of Pall Malls sticking out of his pocket probably contributed to this as much as his advanced age), but he turned out to be something of a master dishwasher repairman.

As you might expect, the dishwasher started running just fine for the first time all week when the repairmen showed up. We sat around waiting to see if the dishwasher would make it into its rinse cycle successfully. After about 20 minutes with no problems, the repairmen were getting ready to pack up their tools when the old guy, who had been intently examining the side of the dishwasher door for a few minutes, suddenly realized that the dishwasher was way off level. He checked it with a level, then, in a scene that kind of reminded me of Arrested Development's Uncle Jack, barked out commands to the younger, stronger, and somewhat dimwitted apprentice to get the dishwasher back on level.

The leveling seems to have done the trick as the dishwasher has run successfully several times since the fix. If your dishwasher ever stops filling, you might want to check the level. If that doesn't fix it and you have to bring in a repairman, don't be alarmed if a chain-smoking octogenarian shows up to fix it. Just sit back and watch him work his magic. Where does one find such repairmen? On craigslist, of course. Not having a repairman of choice, I started looking around on the web for appliance repair services, only to be horrified by the abysmal reviews of the local appliance repair businesses. I went to Craigslist on a hunch, and found a number of people advertising appliance repair services. A Craigslist advertisement is no guarantee of good service, but I feel like people who are working independently instead of for a store or an appliance repair company are more likely to try and deliver good service, since the only thing they have to trade on is their reputation.