Wednesday, March 28, 2012

I Am Super Bat Green Lantern Wonder Fem

Do you ever have indisputable bad-ass moments?  


Moments when you are absolutely convinced Superman* is in your bloodline?  


I had one of those moments last week.  


Dear readers, I replaced a part on an appliance last week all by myself.  


And I've got pictures to prove it. 


The dryer became possessed a few weekends back.  Observe....


.....

Well, never mind. I had grand plans of posting a video of my dryer before we had it exorcised, but every time I attempt to upload the video Blogger gets all pissy.  


Whatever. 


Trust me when I tell you the beeping was CONSTANT. As soon as I turned on the dryer, it started and would. not. stop. EVER.  I tried to do loads of laundry and mask the sound with loud music and earplugs, but that didn't really help because the dryer would just quit running within a minute of my turning it on. 


Clearly the situation called for Geek intervention. 


He took the thing apart, diagnosed the problem as a bad mother board and then had me call the repairman to come out and check just to ensure he was right.  


The good news is he was. 


The bad news is it cost us $90 to receive said confirmation.  


We refused to pay an additional $200 for the privilege of having a repairman replace the part, so Mitch went online and ordered it.  


That he left my utility room in a holy wholly mess in the interim shant be addressed in this blog post. It's enough that he foresaw the need to fork over the extra cash for overnight delivery of the part. This might have had something to do with the fact that the dryer had taken to beeping  at 4 in the morning. 


Thankfully we don't keep baseball bats in the house.


Fast forward two days.


The part arrived, Mitch was at work, we were leaving for a weekend excursion the following day and I was six loads behind on laundry.  


It was time to take matters in my own hands. 


At first I thought I was going to actually have to touch the Mother Board... 



...and I had began having second thoughts. I'm not going to lie--all those little nubs and trinkets and whatchmacallits are about as clear as Kanji to me and I'm nearly as terrified of them as I am of spiders. But when I took the time to unwrap the part I was saved because it was ready to plug in. And figuring out the three plugs and the two wire attachments was easy.   


The part is hanging from the wires. I don't feel the need to add lines, arrows,  etc this time
All I really had to do was put button cover back on. (In the picture above, you're looking at the underside of the cover, which is sitting atop the dryer.)   


The little buttons on our machines? Actually several different parts. 


Small parts. 


Including springs. 


That tend fall on the floor and bounce all the way into the neighbor's yard at will. 


No fewer than four times did I inadvertently turn over the piece with the buttons and send them flying all over the place. 


Which is why one of my machine buttons is now bit less springy than the other buttons. But check this out: when I put Humpty-Dumpty back together, I examined which buttons went where and made the button without a spring one that I rarely use! 


Say you: Wow.  


Say me: I KNOW!


It's like aliens were inhabiting my body.  


It gets better.  


Because when it was time to screw in the 116 screws required to affix all the parts together, I picked up the drill to get to work. But before I turned it on, I thought that Mitch had used it before to remove the screws and it was probably still set to rotate counter-clockwise. And you know what? I was right! I had the nerve to actually set the drill to rotate clockwise before I started putting the screws back. 


Say you: Whoa. 


Say me: I KNOW!


I won't go into the all the tedious details that led me to having to remove the new part once I had it completely installed. 


It had to do with a seemingly minor piece that I initially rejected but turned out to be rather important to the overall functioning of my dryer: 


Never underestimate the power of the black, plastic cylinder thingy. 
But! Even with me having to essentially replace the part TWICE, it only took me about an hour and half to have my dryer in working order. With only four screws and a tiny light cover left over. 


But wait! There's MORE! 


Since The Boy was home for spring break, I could call him into service and together we stacked it back on the washing machine. 


On the first try. 


I even remembered to put the vent hose back on. 


Yes, you may kneel and kiss my ring now.  


I'm thinking I can milk this accomplishment for the next year.


Washing clothes? My family can do that because I fixed the dryer.  


Folding clothes? It's on them. I fixed the dryer. 


Clean bathrooms? Pfft. I fixed the dryer.  


Going to my job? Who needs me to work? I fixed the dryer. 


My accomplishment was so noteworthy, I think I'm going to change my license plate: 


FXD DRYR  -> 




*I suppose I could have gone with Batman here, but he's a bit moody, isn't he? At least that's what the internet tells me.  

1 comment:

Carolyn said...

I bow to the Queen of dryer repairwomen!