Wash the dishes, dry the dishes, turn the dishes oooover.



knives up



  Bill and I joke that the thing we fight about the most is how to properly load the dishwasher. He tends to over fill, is haphazard with dish placement and intentionally places  the knives facing up. I am more methodical and place the knives facing down. The knife placement is key. My method will  prevent injury to the unloader. That would be... me. I am the unloader. Bill does not unload. Which is another reason we fight about the dishwasher.







knives down

 Our KitchenAid has had three visits from the repair guy. Each time the weight of the door had forced the hinges to fail. Personally, I believed that was because Bill had overfilled the bottom once too many times and left the door open with the rack pulled out - thereby causing too much stress on the hinges. In addition to fixing the hinge issues the repair guy always cleaned the 'trap' and unplugged the drain from packed lobster shells, olive pits and various nuts. (Neither of us rinses well, either - so we're even there). Since those repairs were done, the dishwasher has also lost the functionality of two buttons (so we just don't do those "types" of loads- who uses 'sani-rinse' anyway?) and recently the pop open action of the soap dispenser has become really unreliable, i.e. it doesn't dispense the soap. Water still runs through, there is no rust and it does a passable job if it's not filled up tight. I hesitate to do anything with it because of its almost adequate performance and because the thought of putting one more humongous white appliance in a landfill upsets me.  But, on Saturday I lost it when the entire top rack of glassware had crud pasted everywhere. I was not going to deal with this issue any longer.

I had no idea about the price of dishwashers. So, I looked at the Buffalo News circulars in the Sunday paper. I tend to (OK, I ONLY) buy appliances from Orville's. They are close, they have good service.. and did I mention they are close?

The front page of the advertisement showed a Frigidaire for $247. I thought to my self: "I've been putting up with this and it's really just a $250 problem? I can deal with that".  So, off I went to have a look- see at Orville's.

Savvy readers know where I'm going with the rest of the story... I walked out of Orville's Appliance with an invoice for a $700 dishwasher. SEVEN HUNDRED dollars! And it wasn't even in stock!
But... it had this extra power scrub thing and you can move the racks around and it had a separate heater to make the water EXTRA hot.

The sales lady clearly knew a "mark" when she saw one; she led me immediately to the 'better' models. I hemmed and hawed and even asked if there was any play in the price - and where the heck was the $247 advertised deal? But, I eventually handed her my credit card. WHY? Because I thought if I bought a Kitchen Aid Superba (that's the name of it.... I mistakenly thought that the name on the sheet was accidently cut off and it was actually called SuperBAD - which is a much better name, by the way) and it does everything it said it would, things might change at our house. And all I would have to get used to is having the knives facing up  - and of course continuing to do the unloading.

And then Bill and I won't fight at all.