(Thanks to my friend vimes for the title joke.)

Warning, before we begin: this is a long story about dishwasher repair. It has nothing to do with Japan and nothing to do with food, and Iris doesn’t appear in it at all. But I found the outcome completely fascinating, and I figure I must have a couple of readers geeky enough to feel the same way. Consider this the kitchen appliance equivalent of the Diagnosis column from the New York Times Magazine, and see if you can figure out the surprise ending before we get there. (I certainly didn’t.)

A few months ago, our 21-year-old dishwasher started behaving strangely. It was leaking slightly and leaving a weird residue on dishes. Our apartment manager, figuring it wasn’t worth it to repair a 21-year-old dishwasher, kindly got us a new one, a GE/Hotpoint.

It worked fine for a couple of weeks. Then, one day, I opened it after the cycle was finished and found two inches of water on the bottom that hadn’t drained at the end of the cycle. I ran it again and it did the same thing.

The building maintenance guy came over. He looked at it and said, “Oh, the guy who installed this put in the hoses wrong.” He did some hose reconfiguration, cranked the dial on the front of the dishwasher, and showed me that it was now draining well.

After he left, I ran a full cycle. It finished with two inches of water on the bottom.

The maintenance guy came back. He disassembled the bottom of the dishwasher and speculated that maybe the drain was just partially occluded, and this was causing the solenoid to overheat partway through the cycle. He reconfigured the hoses again in an attempt to ensure that the dishwasher wasn’t working so hard to drain water. To replace the solenoid, however, we’d have to have GE come in. So he left it disassembled. I spent a couple of weeks hand-washing and drying all the dishes. Have you ever wondered if your life would be better if you got rid of all your modern conveniences and went back to the way Granny did things? Well, it sucks.

A couple weeks later, a guy from GE came over. He carried an indestructible Toughbook laptop, which I drooled over in a geeky way. He took a look and had some harsh words for the maintenance guy (I remembered this now from my tech support days: part of the job is always observing that the person before you was an idiot. Exceptionally polite tech support/maintenance people say it in their heads, not aloud, but this is rare.) He replaced the solenoid and said the problem was with a part I didn’t entirely understand: something about how a ball had to be sitting in a socket in order for the drain to work, and the ball was in the wrong place. He cranked the dial and showed me that it was draining well.

I was not surprised when, next time I ran the dishwasher, the problem was still there. This time, however, I decided that if the GE guy can twist a dial, so can I. So, immediately after the cycle ended, I turned the dial back around until I heard the water gurgling into the sink drain, which sounds a lot like Iris when she is really thirsty. It drained completely. This was my procedure for the next two weeks: catch the dishwasher at the end of the wash cycle; turn the dial to drain manually; turn the dial to the dry cycle. I also noticed that the amount of water left on the floor of the appliance varied quite a bit from cycle to cycle: sometimes it was nearly full, sometimes nearly empty, but never completely empty.

The GE guy came back, and he was perplexed and a little sheepish that he hadn’t fixed it last time. He filled and drained the dishwasher many times and observed aloud that it was draining well. He speculated that maybe I had a small clog in the downspout, and pressure was building up and water backing up over the course of the cycle. He asked if I’d ever noticed water backing up into the sink when running the sink faucet. I said no.

This was, in case you’ve lost count, the fourth repair visit. Four times, I’d complained that there was something wrong with the drain (or the outflow mechanism, at least) and four times someone had come out to fix the drain.

The GE guy called a colleague, who I imagined as a retired *éminence grise* of appliance repair. They spoke for a few minutes, and I wasn’t really paying attention, but when he got off the phone, he was grinning. He looked like the detective who’d just solved the case–because he had. I’ve probably made this face before after solving a pesky computer problem, but I’ve never seen it in such a pure form on someone else.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the drain,” said the GE guy. “The problem only happens at the end of the cycle, right?” I nodded. “Well, there’s no water level sensor in there. It just drains for a certain amount of time and then stops. If it’s not empty, it’ll just go on to the dry cycle, oblivious.”

“So you mean the little dial thingy is just running too fast at the end of the cycle?”

“Right, the timer.”

There’s nothing wrong with the patient’s intestines: it’s his brain!

“I have a new timer unit in my truck,” said the guy. He came back and installed it, a little $75 plastic part. The problem is now completely solved.

I don’t think GE made any profit on this dishwasher, but I called them to commend their Holmesian technician and his (presumably) grizzled mentor.