Out with the Old

When Brad was still here, he, Lauren and I made a quick trip into Lincoln to… Um… I’m not exactly sure why we went into Lincoln, but I used it as an excuse to look at dishwashers. Lauren was strangely unexcited about the prospect of a new dishwasher.

Lauren views dishwashers as a way to get dishes clean. She has absolutely no sense of the truth and beauty that comes from a properly loaded dishwasher.

The dishwasher that came with our house must have been about 15 years old, and either dishes had changed in that time, or our dish use never coincided with the Average American Dishware that the people who design dishwashers used when designing dishwashers.

At any rate, loading the dishwasher properly was a passion of mine that Lauren just couldn’t get on board with. Not that I ever failed to blame her for that. Anyway, to make a long story pretty much the same length, I was dissatisfied with our dishwasher because of my inability to (a) solve the loading equation and (b) convince Lauren that my solution to the loading equation was better than her solution.  And Lauren was dissatisfied with our dishwasher because it would occasionally smell funny and need to have some bleach run through it.

Before we went to Lincoln I looked through a leading consumer magazine for likely brands and models. When I had it down to a few, I went to Sears.com (where America and I shop) and printed off the comparison of those models. Looking through roughly 6 pages of data, I came up with the following qualifications for our new dishwasher:

• Adjustable racks so as to fit largish pots and pans
• A fairly quick wash cycle
• Lots of different cycles for all of our dish washing needs
• Built in heating element so we didn’t have to set the water heater higher
• Food disposal, so I didn’t have to forget to empty the filter
• Power scrubbers, because who wouldn’t want those
• A quiet wash cycle, because our downstairs is basically one big room

This was Lauren’s list of qualifications for our new dishwasher:

• Does not smell funny

Our plan was to go to Home Depot, Schaeffer’s, Best Buy and Sears. We’d go in that order because (a) that’s the order that they come in and (b) We’ve purchased all of our major appliances for Sears since Circuit City (a) became a desolate crap hole of terrible customer service and (b) went out of business. [I do hereby solemnly swear that I will not use “(a) … (b) …” for the next week and a half.]

Well, that was the plan. But once we got to Schaeffer’s our salesman was so knowledgeable and helpful and not at all pushy or rushed that we just bought it from him. We got the Whirlpool GU3200XTX, but we didn’t have the truck with us, so we made arrangements to drop the old dishwasher off and pick up the new one next week.

Surprisingly enough it doesn’t have:

• Adjustable racks so as to fit largish pots and pans, because Lauren said that we wouldn’t ever take the time to adjust the racks anyway.
• A fairly quick wash cycle, because Lauren said that we have never sat around and waited for the dishwasher to get done.
• Lots of different cycles for all of our dish washing needs, because Lauren said that we only use two cycles on our dishwasher anyway: rinse and normal wash.
• Power scrubbers, because Lauren said that we’d do what we currently do when dishes don’t get clean –leave them in the dish washer.
• A quiet wash cycle, because Lauren said that our current dishwasher was just about as loud as you could get, and everything these days was quieter (and also took about an hour longer to wash than our old dishwasher).

 
Not surprisingly, it does not smell funny.