You miserable fuck.

Well, I don’t know anything about British but just for giggles I ran it through an Elmer Fudd dialectizer:

So my dishwashew died. Actuawwy, it wowked pewfectwy, but the handwe watch bwoke and sometimes my cwean dishes wouwd get twapped in thewe. Unfowtunatewy, the fwy-by-night tiwe guy instawwed my fwoow tiwes wight up next to the damn thing, so I put off wepwacing the dishwashew because I was concewned I’d have to smash a few tiwes to get the owd one out and the new one in, uh-hah-hah-hah. No wowwies, said my fwiend, who is mawwied to an Engwish guy. We’we wedoing ouw kitchen and we don’t use the dishwashew, so we’ww give you ouws. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit! I’ww send the husband ovew to youw house wif it.

Engwish guy shows up wif the dishwashew. He’s got things to do, he tewws me, but he’ww come back watew to instaww it fow me and hewp me hauw off the owd one, which he nevew does. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit! I finawwy hiwe a handyman to puww out the owd one and instaww the new one. Suwe enough, he has to smash thwee tiwes and jack up my countewtop to get the owd one out and the new one in, uh-hah-hah-hah. Wuckiwy, I kept spawe tiwes, mowtaw, and gwout fow just such an occasion, so in no time at aww, I had a new wowking dishwashew, suwwounded by shiny new tiwes. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit! Gweat! Aww is weww!

Den one day, the dishwashew just wandomwy tuwned itsewf on, uh-hah-hah-hah. Anothew day, it wouwd wandomwy tuwn itsewf off. One day, it just wan the “cwystaws” cycwe ovew and ovew and ovew and ovew, untiw I opened the doow. Dewe is no “off” button that I’m awawe of. It won’t dwain anymowe, so evewy now and then I have to go in thewe wif a tuwkey bastew to dwain the damn thing. I want to wepwace it wif a new dishwashew, but I wiww have to go thwough the whowe “smash up my tiwes and we-tiwe” thing again, uh-hah-hah-hah.

De mowaw to my stowy is: nevew, evew, evew accept ow puwchase a used appwiance. You don’t know how owd it is ow what is wwong wif it. You may be stuck wif wepwacing the exact same appwiance just a few weeks ow months aftew youw initiaw wepwacement. Suck it up and buy new so you know what you’we getting. De end.

See? When you get something for nothing you just don’t look after it, do you..?

Maybe a British Jew.

He didn’t pick it up off the curb on garbage day. It was offered to him by a relation, who presumably would like to continue having good relations with kambukta. Offering a “gift” of an appliance someone needs as a way to avoid disposal fees, is NOT how one goes about maintaining good relations with family. Not only have you failed to provide the promised assistance, you have saddled someone with work and costs that are rightfully yours.

let’s see …

Did the washing machine work when kambukta picked it up? Did the washing machine work when her mum and stepdad left it behind? (Abandoned it?) Did a wire come loose during the move? Is a switch jammed? Did the timer unit break?

And who used the washing machine? Only the stepdad? Who would know if the washing machine didn’t work?

OMG. That was epic! Thank you!

BTW, I like my own story much better, told that way. :wink:

I’ll agree it sounds like the switch that gets depressed when the lid closes (and allows the spin cycle to start) is simply broken. If you get the make / model of your washing machine you can almost certainly find a replacement part at a store or on the internet.

It’s really a safety feature, if you’ve ever noticed you can with most model washing machines leave the lid open for a lot of the washing process…but it won’t start a spin cycle with the lid open. This is because in theory if you were supremely stupid you could hurt yourself if you put your hand into a spinning washing machine. So that being said, if you at the top of your machine, look at the areas where the lid closes down onto…there should be on the left or right side of the drum a tiny hole. In normal operation when the lid is closed it pushes a piece of metal or plastic into the hole which depresses a switch which allows a circuit to close which allows the spin cycle to start.

Once you find that hole, if you reach down through the side you should be able to actually pull the wires out so you can look at them, and you can actually snip the switch off and then directly attach the wires to one another and bind them with electrical tape. You’ve now bypassed the safety switch and can use the spin cycle for basically free ( the cost of a few inches of electrical tape.) It’s not ideal or technically the safest thing, but in leaner times in my life I actually ran a washing machine with the switch bypassed for several years and nothing bad ever happened.

Its 120km away, so say it takes five hours to get there, load the machine, drive back and unload at the other end. Median Australian worker income is 54k a year*, so 27 an hour. Five hours works out to 135. The washers on appliancesonline.au are 400 and up.

So that’s why

*if you google “average australian…” the top suggestion from Googles autofill thing is “average Australian Shepard weight?” Apparently its a breed of dog, but when I saw it I was picturing millions of weight concious Australian sheep herders googling to see how fat their co-workers were.

Why on Earth would it take 5 hours? It’d be an hour each way, tops, and maybe another half hour of load/unload time. Even if you needed an hour for that, which is very generous, that’s still only three hours.

You’d have to be on some really shit backwoods roads to take 5 hours to go 120 km…I think Australia isn’t like the UK in that it generally has decent roadways for long distance travel, no? (I only mention the UK because despite being a small country, it can take a lot longer to travel as a lot of the roads are narrower and windier than you’d maybe first think if you hadn’t driven them.)

People getting screwed over by family. Then venting when they find out they’ve been screwed over.

I am sympathetic.

And in other news, our dishwasher went toes up this weekend, probably in sympathy of this thread (I left it running while we went out for a little while, and when I came back, it was making a strange noise, it smelled funny, and the dishes weren’t clean, but they were very, very hot - we won’t be turning it on again!).

Oh, that reminds me-- your cousin Douglas called. He’s got a dishwasher that he’s tossing. It’s sitting out by the curb – if you want to drive six hours in a borrowed truck, it’s yours.

Funny fuckers aren’t ya?? :smiley:

The washing machine is still somewhat dead, and unfixable according to the local washing-machine fella. It’s one of those computer-run machines, but being of the older vintage, the ‘board’ isn’t available anymore. I don’t speak ‘technology’ but I got the general gist of what’s happening.
*
However,* that being said, the Miserable Fuck helped out (unrequested) in an emergency we had over the weekend. And for that I say a big THANKS. In my move back to suburbia we had a MVA (nobody hurt thank OG) but incurred a shitload of expenses, and the Miserable Fuck offered financial assistance to ease our burden.

I hereby absolve him of the Washing Machine Sin.

:smiley: