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I couldn’t get my dishwasher to drain. The water stank of cat food and it made me very very unhappy to stick my hand into the dirty muck and disassemble the thing that spins around and the thing that catches food in order to clean out the bacon grease. In the middle of this putrid horror, my son asked for me to make him a snack. I yelled at him.

After running the dishwasher a few more times, the water was clearish but still wasn’t draining. I went for a swim. After a few minutes, The blue mid-afternoon sky got a bit cloudy, and there was some thunder. The lifeguards kicked everyone out of the pool, but it seemed evident that the storm was distant and heading even further away. But the safety protocol was to wait for a period of time to confirm that the danger had passed.

While waiting my daughter chatted with a friend about she too might like to summer lifeguard, one day when she was old enough. There was a handsome boy who seemed to be in charge, and every few minutes my daughter would ask the male lifeguard when she could go back in. After 15 minutes, the lifeguard said “25 minutes.” After 45 minutes he said “24 minutes” and then gave a sidelong glance to his friends, who laughed.

I went ballistic.

I’m not sure if it was the arbitrary exercise of power by this 17 year old punk or the fact that the laughs were at the expense of my little girl who admired this unworthy piece of garbage. And I’ll tell you what: The fact that my dishwasher wouldn’t drain was certainly part of the anger. Both the dishwasher and the kid were these banal, unfair, indecipherable blockages; impervious and ruining everything.

“Hey you.”

Yes sir?

“My daughter isn’t an annoyance for you to laugh at. Her safety is the reason why you are here. And if it isn’t then you should be either.”

I…

“You got that now? No? Well, one way or the other, that’s going to have to change. Let’s go kids”

After that, I took the kids to get some queso and quesadillas. Then we came back and played the “Toy Story 3” video game for the Wii. Then I told the kids to go to bed, and entered the headline of this post into google. At first, I found all these ad hoc sites that blamed GE for making a bad dishwasher.

Then I went to the GE site and found this:
video from GE

The video turns out to be a little vague. The most important revelation, however, was that the problem wasn’t to be solved by attacking the filthy dishwasher part of the dishwasher drain head-on. Rather, there was a logical and less disgusting, but non-obvious solution in the air-gapped drainage line that sticks up through the sink and connects to the dishwasher. The video is kind of vague because, it doesn’t mention that this drain line can run through your garbage disposal.

Basically, the video tells you to take off the silver cap from that thing on the back right hand corner of the sink that looks like it should dispense hand soap. Turns out, that thing doesn’t dispense hand soap at all. Instead, it houses some other weird looking thing, called a diverter tube. Stick your thumb or a screwdriver (or basically anything that is strong enough) in the little plastic tab holding the white plastic seal on top of the diverter tube. Then, you’ll find a plastic hose inside the diverter tube (the plastic hose looks like a bendy straw). The way the diverter tube works is this: when the dishwasher is running and would otherwise fill up with so much water that it would go above a the level of the door hinge, and then leak out the seal on the bottom of the door, the water (somehow) instead goes inside the plastic hose of the diverter tube. The diverter tube goes straight up to the countertop (right hand corner of the sink). If the diverter tube gets too filled up, then it spurts dishwater out of that diverter tube, like its the top of an oil rig, but less like a gusher and more like a trickles, most of which goes back down into the diverter tube and somehow drains that way. In the worst case, water shoots out of the diverter tube but drains harmlessly into the sink.

Sounds like it won’t work, right? But it mostly does… unless you get solid bits of stuff inside the plastic hose of that diverter tube. Fixing a clogged hose is unglamorous. I found that the plastic hose is a pain in the neck to get out, but its doable, just don’t be shy. Then once it is out, you can thwack it a bunch on the side of the sink, until the stuff in it gets dislodged. I tried blowing in it and sticking brushed in there. I think if I was a plumbing genius (clearly I am not), I could have gotten underneath the sink and detached the line from the garbage disposal. But, thwacking worked just fine. Eventually the debris clears out, and once it does you can put the whole kit and kaboodle back in.

I found half a dozen unpoped popcorn kernels, pin bones from a salmon, cat food chunks, and more bacon grease. It formed a horrible 3 inch-long block in the plastic hose, preventing it from spurting into the diverter tube. Cleaning out the plastic hose was a huge mess. Bits of food got everywhere and it smelled awful. Once it was out, however, everything worked perfect after that.

I ran the dishwasher and it totally drained, although there were still food remnants in the screen that had to be cleared out, and I saw that my earlier attempts to “fix” it from the front end had dislodged bits of the plastic dishwasher’s assembly that shouldn’t be dislodged. I used paper towels to clean up the food remnants, and used a screwdriver to re-lodge all the parts of the dishwasher that I had moved out of place, into their correct place.

I used some softs scrub and formula 409 to clean off the surface of everything. I also ran a tray of ice cubes through the insinkerator, then I ran the dishwasher again a few more times. With each run of the dishwasher completed without there being any stinky standing water, I felt my anger melt away a little more. Finally, I decided that everything looked good, so I took a shower.

I also decided to send an email to the community association’s management company to complain about the lifeguard who had been rude to my daughter.

The kids hadn’t gone to bed, of course. The whole time I was fixing the dishwasher drainage issue, the kids stayed up and watched cartoons. During all of that, they managed to make and eat a big bowl of microwave popcorn. At one point, one of my kids tried to put the bowl, empty except for a  bunch of unpopped kernels into the dishwasher. I stopped that, and I didn’t get upset.

I thought they’d have been disappointed about not being able to swim, but they seemed pretty happy. They asked me if I wanted to play “Lego Rock Band” with them on Wii. I did. We played for a while and then I got serious about bed and tucked them in.

Since my ex left, getting them to sleep has often been an ordeal. I’ve come to realize that one reason it is an ordeal is that I am distracted by things that seem more urgent, when I really ought to focus and prioritize getting them to go to sleep.

Today, there was no ordeal. They were very sweet. “Good night, Dad, I love you.”

I feel like there is an important moral lesson here. I can’t figure out precisely what it is.