Do You Hear That Sucking Sound?
By Margaret Travis

That’s my house, sucking the life right out of me.

Recently, the dishwasher went out. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. My guess is it’s just old. My husband said he loaded it, started it and went back in a little later to a huge puddle of water in our kitchen floor.

This summer the handle to the microwave broke. My husband put a cabinet handle on the microwave. Classy, I know, but it works pretty well. It has also put off the horrible task of going to look at appliances. You know the process, going to the library to see what Consumer Reports says about the various microwaves, then traveling all over town to look at every single microwave in our price range. Then debating the relative merits of the store that has a lower sales tax vs. the store that will install and deliver for free.

You see, my husband and I can’t just go buy a damned microwave. It somehow always turns into a Project, capital P. Sort of like the cabinet handle he put on the microwave. It wasn’t on the cabinet when we bought it but for some reason when we went to install them they didn’t work. I put the bag of handles on the back counter thinking, stupidly I know, that I would take them back to that mega super store we bought them from. But it took us FOREVER to pick handles that we could agree upon. We went to Lowe’s, Ace and two Home Depots in town. The thought of going and looking at EVERY.SINGLE.CABINET.HANDLE. at Home Depot again made me want to poke forks in my eyes.

It also requires we find a babysitter - or someplace to dump the kids. They simply do not have the patience for it. Someone would probably end up screaming and throwing themselves on the floor and crying. I couldn’t guarantee it would be one of the children.

Then my daughter decided she needed a handle for some project at school. And then my son decided he needed one, or eight. And then I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and stepped on one which promptly went into the trash. Suddenly I have a receipt dated a year ago for 10 cabinet handles and three drawer pulls (yeah, we’ve got no cabinet space in my kitchen), and I have one drawer pull and two handles.

But the broken down dishwasher may motivate me. To begin that awful process of replacing.an.appliance. Because Oh My God it will turn into a nightmare before it’s over.

My husband will have to find the CR magazine that last studied dishwashers like they were studying the atomic bomb. And then we’ll have to decide on the features that mean the most to us. Pot scrubbing is probably good. China washing probably not so much. And then we’ll have to locate the places that have the dishwashers with those features in our town or any surrounding hamlets within a reasonable driving distance. Well, you get the idea.I’m looking around my house now and beginning to wonder, “What else can go wrong?” Cause I simply cannot buy two major appliances in one year. And that handle on the microwave is beginning to look awful shaky.