Three Things I Learned From a Broken Dishwasher

1 point · November 2026

The dishwasher broke on a Tuesday and was not fixed until the following Thursday, which is nine days, which is long enough to learn things you did not intend to learn.

One. We own more plates than we need, and the number we need is four. I know this because for nine days we washed four plates by hand and the other twenty sat in the cupboard doing what they always do, which is nothing.

Two. The dishwasher was never saving us time. It was saving us the conversation about whose turn it was. Without it, the conversation came back, and it turned out to be a short one, and the shortness was the surprise.

Three. The engineer who came on the Thursday looked at it for two minutes and replaced a part the size of a coin. I asked what the part did and he said it tells the machine the door is shut. So for nine days the machine believed the door was open, and would not start, and was in a sense correct: something was open.

I have not put the twenty plates back.