On Monday evening, Rick and I had a look at the washing machine. We tilted it, removed the filter (completely clean, which surprised me), and even went through the trouble of removing the front bottom panel and to access hoses, the pump and the motor underneath. The top had already been removed. All looked in good order. Upon replacement of the last damn screw, it was with a sinking heart that I pressed START and bowed to the powers of the Bosch universe. The washer was humming as before, but was still not taking any water.
The day after, upon collection of my car which only cost a miserable £ 102 to fix which, you will agree, is a tiny price to pay for a not-at-all tiny car, I phoned Bosch, said that the removal of the filter and whatnot had yielded a non-result and that a technician was needed after all.
The guy turned up this afternoon as planned. He listened to the explanation of the symptoms, nodded slowly and
said: ‘Let’s see, shall we?’. He pressed the START button and immediately water swooshed from the tap into the drum. ‘Well, that’s odd,’ I said, brow furrowed and right hand scratching my chin, ‘I tried it many times the other night, after I put it back together, and it still wasn’t working’. He re-nodded and said that it probably wouldn’t drain. So we waited, seconds ticking away on the display, until we heard another swoosh, this time of water being released from the machine into the drain behind.
Much chit-chat followed as he played around with the programmes and got the washer (which I was by then silently referring to as The Bastard) to take the water, spin for a while, drain, spin and finish over and over. Then a few times more. I encouraged him to take it apart and put it back together. Crazy? Moi? No, it’s just that I badly wanted to get my £ 85 worth of call-out charge you see.
When I waved him goodbye, a scant twenty minutes after he had arrived, I proceeded to my chair at the dining room table, where I slumped, angry and defeated. Much more defeated than angry, if truth be told. I am sliding down the slippery slope of the comically unlucky ones, of those who are followed around by a thundering cloud, of those who are afflicted by the Negative Midas Syndrome, turning everything they approach into lead and everything they touch into shit.
No matter how well I think I do, no matter how hard I try (and I cannot say that taking a washing machine apart is dead easy), someone, something, somewhere conspires against me, so that every time I’ve got a fistful of dollars in my hand, I must immediately flush them down the nearest available toilet. I wouldn’t feel this conspired-against if I knew that my £ 85 went, say, to Haiti, or to cats and dogs in need, or to the preservation of our national heritage. To know that, effectively, they have flapped out of my house on the way to nowhere because of a working washing machine bamboozles me, yes!
At this point you may ask the obvious: but what happened to the washing machine? Why was it not working anyway? I don’t know dear reader, neither did the technician, who suggested, after much prodding from my part, that it may have frozen (mid-cycle? After another cycle I had just run? I am not sure of that one). The truth is that I’ll never know, you will never know, the machine will never know, the technician will never know and the £ 85 will never know either.
