In which Benjamin makes a mess

Thursday night after dinner I opened the dishwasher to empty it out, and discovered that the dishes were all covered in gunk - instead of cleaning them, it appeared that the dishwasher had implemented a kind of communist redistribution of filth. When I looked into the base of the machine, I discovered that it still had two inches of water standing in the bottom.

Now, what had actually happened was not at all a big deal; either Rose or I had bumped against the power button while we were making dinner and stopped the dishwasher mid-cycle. Looking at the mess in there, though, and remembering that we'd had a few loads of dishes come out still dirty, I came to the conclusion that the dishwasher's drain had become plugged. When pulling out the filter didn't help, I did the obvious thing and poured in several cups of Draino.

Several hours later, the water still had not drained from the dishwasher. Standing in front of it and dreading the expense of bringing a plumber up to fix it, I noticed that the power button was poking out in its "off" position. When I depressed it, the dishwasher hummed into life.

"Yay!" I exclaimed. My troubles were over!

Only as it turns out, Draino makes bubbles just like dish soap. I know not to put dish soap into a dishwasher, because I did it once as a child when I wanted to help my mom by doing the dishes for her and flooded the kitchen with suds. Fortunately, the image of my mother on her hands and knees in an ocean of soap bubbles has stuck with me through the years, and the possibility that Draino might have high surface-tension occurred to me, so I only let the machine fill up about half way with bubbles before I opened it to check. WOOSH!

Rose had already gone to bed at this point, having asked me to wait until the dishwasher had run through to make sure nothing went wrong. I was up until two in the morning getting that damnable thing fixed. Turn it on for two minutes, open it up, pour in water so that the pump had something to pump other than suds, let the bubbles settle down, turn the machine back on for two minutes... Finally the machine cycled to drain and emptied itself out. I ran it one more time empty to clean out the last residue and went to bed.

Rose woke up Friday morning and went into the kitchen. "Hey!" she called back to me, cheerfully clawing me from my sleep, "I was really concerned about letting the dishwasher run with Draino in it, but it's fine! All that worry for nothing."

I just groaned my assent and went back to sleep.