Author: Jack Flacco

This is one of those nonsense Freedom Friday posts I’m writing without forethought as to where it will go. It’s about appliances. Specifically, it’s about my family’s usage of our appliances and the lessons I’ve learned. Take a chair, this might prove either beneficial or a real snorer.

First thing’s first, I’m not going to name any brand names in this piece because a) I don’t want any trouble from appliance manufacturers hunting me down or my firstborn in an effort to convince me to retract my statements, and b) I don’t want to make it seem as if I’m promoting a product because I think it’s the next best thing to lemon and avocado.

Having said that, I’ll ask the question that’s been on my mind for a while. Has anyone had as much luck with appliances as my family and I have? And when I’m asking this, mind you, I’m asking it with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek.

In the past ten years, my family has burned through three dishwashers, three food processors, two microwaves, a stove, a fridge, a water heater, a gas furnace, a couple of TVs and blenders, and a car—but that’s not really an appliance. I added it in anyway for completeness. The stove and fridge were lonely without a ride.

Let’s start with the dishwashers, since I figure it’s the one thing on the list that keeps us busy washing dishes after it says it’d completed its cycle. I’ll totally skip dishwasher #1 and simply go for the jugular—dishwasher #2. After a year, or you can read it as saying after the warranty ran out, it began making all sorts of churning noises. The noises were awful. They sounded like the machine had eaten a plate and swallowed it whole. By the end of its cycle, the dishes were clean and we thought nothing of it until a day later when my wife loaded the thing and pressed the Normal button. She waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. “Jaaack!” Came the call. I knew the tone. Something needed fixing. Well, the Normal setting didn’t work anymore. My solution? Press the Light button. That lasted for a year until I replaced the machine with one of those fancy-shmancy quiet models. Dishwasher #3. It was good for a while and it, too, then made that grinding noise. This time, I took the thing apart and found the machine had an actual grinder to grind food. Go figure. It broke. Well, if all it did was grind food, I didn’t think it important enough to buy a new model. I just removed the grinder. End of noise. But lately it’s been acting up, not wanting to wash dishes to washing them and leaving gunk on them. Gunk is my definition of crap that sticks to the plate and doesn’t let go. I’ll stop there.

Our food processors haven’t fared any better. One of them had a cup assembly we used to make smoothies. The teeth under the lid of the mixer had worn down and we now have a cabinet filled with useless plastic cups no one uses because the motor can’t latch on to the lid. Food processor #2’s motor burned out. Something about a leaky smoothy that short-circuited the electronics inside the motor’s casing—or something like that. Suffice it to say it’s DOA.

Then we had the water heater debacle that took place a few years ago. It was old, the water was sometimes brown and it took at least five minutes before any one of us could run a bath. Switching it for a new one was a grand process in and of itself. We replaced it, but it was the wrong model. They came back a week later and switched it with a newer one. Guess what. Yep, the wrong one again. Third time out, the heating company got it right. One thing though; a month later, the company not only billed us for the new unit, but they were so kind as to continue billing us for the old one as well. It took a few months of calls and haggling to get it right.

Our fridge is now leaking.

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Do you have a story to tell about an appliance running afoul in the middle of the night?