Our washing machine packed up on Friday.
In fact, it’s just something jammed in the drainage pump (we think), however to get to it you’ve got to basically take the whole thing apart – and based on recent repairs to the dishwasher we reckon that’s gonna be at least £100 for parts & labour. The washer’s now 10 years old, and this would be the 5th repair we’ve done on it, so we concluded that rather than spending more on repairing the thing than it initially cost us (£470ish), we’d upgrade to a newer, more energy efficient one.
Naturally with time/inflation and whatnot the whole exercise is pricier – but we sourced one with a 5 year warranty, and it’s a step up in the range. And they’d deliver it today [i] they could’ve delivered yesterday, but we were out ! And it included disconnection & recycling of the old one and connecting the new one.
I awoke at 7am to check the automated text telling me where in the 7:00-19:00 delivery window we might be. 8:38-12:38, apparently. Over the next 1.5 hours the window narrowed until at 10am I got a “You’re next!” message.
SO EXCITING! [ii] Yes, we’re still talking about a washing machine here. My life has changed in oh so many ways.
And then after a brief inspection, the guy explained why, inevitably, they couldn’t install it.
For reasons best known to themselves – the blokes who installed our new kitchen/utility cabinets appear to have located the isolation tap for the washer inlet pipe behind a wooden board. I think you can see it just below that grey hose end, poking its head up at the bottom of the square hole. It’s not that they didn’t accommodate for it – you can reach the tap through that hole (just). But the long bit of plastic rotates TOWARDS the wood – so it’s not physically possible to turn the tap, cos there’s a lump of wood in the way.
It’s a shame. I genuinely thought they weren’t fuckwits.
Anyway, the mission is now to get a saw and modify the hole (very, very carefully) so that we CAN turn the tap. And the delivery guys will come back for another go.
As they were walking out, I said to the delivery guys, “Ah well, at least you got a nice drive to Bristol”. Then mused, “I bet this happens a lot. Have you successfully delivered & installed any washers today?”. He said, “Two”. I jokingly offered, “Out of what… five?”.
He said, “Yep.”
I had no idea that among the traffic & industry on Britain’s road network, some of it was men employed to take whitegoods out for scenic trips before returning them to their point of origin.
