The Bloody Thing Won’t Keep Still

I have two small children. I’ve seen worse in our bathroom.

Heh. We recently got a new dishwasher, full size, replacing the very old mini-size one that I was keeping together with bailing wire, duct tape, and prayer (It’s nice to have access to money again). We’ve gone from being careful about how many dishes we use to finding any excuse to fill the thing up. A plate that in the past I would dust off a few cracker crumbs to re-use for dinner goes right in the dishwasher.

Heh.
Thing is, I now have to clean the adjacent surfaces and cupboard doors, in an attempt to minimise the contrast.

Delivery chaps? They bringin’ the stuff on motorcycles?

Delivery chaps?
One burly fellow and a scrawny yoot, to be precise. And in a van, happily.

[ Detects fingerprints on front of new oven. ]
Who touched the sacred appliance? WHO TOUCHED IT WITHOUT WHITE COTTON GLOVES?

Isn’t that the same guy who works “Ladies” Night here at the bar?

I believe that one reason younger people interpret punctuation as irritation is that they have not been taught English grammar and syntax in school.

I would think the elevation & indulgence of self-esteem, & the consequent, brittle, conceit, has much to do with it.

Punctuation is violence and good grammar is racist.
One might think the death of clear and concise communication was a feature, not a bug, of this language iconoclasts.
BTW, this appears to only apply to English. I haven’t heard Professors of French or Spanish decrying their grammar rules.

From my observations, these have devolved into a form of Egyptian pictographs
Time to revisit Word Crimes.

I’m reluctant to admit that a device that works in principle really needs repaired.
I’ve done dishes by hand since I left my parents’ household thirty years ago. My tiny little kitchen lacks space, and the wife and I never dirtied that many dishes. That is, until we were locked in our house all day every day. Now it’s relentless! We also lack air conditioning, so my new morning routine consists of doing the dinner dishes at breakfast time, when the kitchen isn’t hotter than Hades.
I’m thinking of downloading an app that makes dishwasher noises, just so I have to turn up the volume on the TV after dinner. I think it would make me feel like a real success!
The bright side is that the house is paid for, and so for a couple of years now I’ve been dumping the former mortgage payments into the Boat Fund. With a bit of good luck, I’ll take an early retirement and sail down to the islands to play guitar, enjoy rum drinks and sunsets, and only occasionally hear news about the race wars raging on the mainland. (With my normal kind of luck, I’ll be shot in the head by a rioter six months before my retirement date.)

My tiny little kitchen lacks space, and the wife and I never dirtied that many dishes.
What we had before was an 18″ wide one (24″ is standard). It sufficed for the minimum. Wife was spending 5 months here in the mountains and I would come up for one or two weeks doing WFH, possibly an extended weekend here and there. The small old one sufficed for our minimum needs so you might consider looking into them. Ours was quite old. I had put off replacing it due to cash flow issues and also because I knew it would take some time to reconfigure our kitchen for a 24″ one. The new ones are sooo much quieter, if your wiling to spend about $400-$500. Used to be that the 18″ ones were more expensive for some reason but that seems to have normalized lately.

We spent a weekend at a friend’s place up on Lake Superior, where they had one of the whisper-quiet half-width machines. I felt like I was living in The Jetsons’ apartment in the sky. We seriously shopped for similar machines, but never quite pulled the trigger on the purchase. If this heat keeps up, we may need to revisit the program.

This is because their teachers were not taught it
So, ultimately to blame for the unpunctuating yoof are the teachers of two generations back…
Back my dishwasher days, some 40 years ago, my gripe was the miasma that belched forth when opening to door to unload it.

Also, wildfire evacuation warning zone a couple miles away just got lifted.
I live just east of the “August Lightning CZU Fire” on the CA coast south of San Francisco.
Yeah!

Further to this, more Mao-ling loveliness.
As someone quipped on Twitter,

If you’re comfortable screaming in someone’s face, for any reason, it means you haven’t been hit in the mouth enough.

Which sounds about right.
And that’s the thing about the kind of tribal, collectivist psychology we’re seeing – there’s no interest in, and an overt denial of, personal responsibility. There’s no reciprocity, at all, and no regard for personal boundaries, except as something to violate, repeatedly and gleefully. It’s quite literally dehumanising. Nothing is ever their fault, a result of their choices, their idiocy, their insatiable malice. They don’t even have to earn their own arguments, such as they are. As a path to piety, screeching and chanting will do. They are, they say, just owed, seemingly without limit.
Needless to say, it’s rather unlikely that the lives of such creatures will on balance be a positive for those around them.

Sam: from the far side of bitter experience, I suggest you investigate the filter (if your washer has one) and the drain line — sounds like one or both be gummed up and the machine is just recirculating a good quantity of fairly nasty washing water during the rinse/drain cycle. YouTube is an endless source of videos (quality variable) available gratis from squadrons of amiable handy-persons (none, I regret to report, appearing to rejoice in the possession of a cervix) who will undertake to explain the care and maintenance of anything from a crescent wrench to a molten-salt reactor — just furnish your machine’s make, model, and current problem, and stand back for the deluge. I LOVE that aspect of YouTube, despite its unsavory by-ways and abusive practices.

Sometimes 7-8 ad breaks (more if you’re not quick enough to cancel the upcoming one) in a 10 minute video.
Yes, quite. YouTube’s policy seems to be to make the default product increasingly user-hostile, aggravatingly loaded with ads and interruptions, thereby annoying users enough to make them pay for the ‘premium’ service. Sort of, “We’re making our product really shit so that you’ll pay for it.”

Relevant
I’m now toying with the idea of wrapping the new oven in plastic sheeting to prevent desecration with unsightly fingerprints. We can just spend the evenings admiring its newness. Forever.

YouTube is an endless source of videos (quality variable) available gratis from squadrons of amiable handy-persons (none, I regret to report, appearing to rejoice in the possession of a cervix)
Heh. I was having the devil of a time removing a very old kitchen faucet yesterday. Usually find those helpful. First video that comes up is of a woman handy-person. She blithely glosses over the part I was having trouble with. Eventually I just looked at still shots of different installation designs and figured it out myself.

@ Megaera
You obviously haven’t met this lady

I can’t quite believe how clean the thing looks.
As clean as a cheese shop? John Cleese wants to know.

Those of a certain age will recall a slightly unkind meme from the 1960s concerning first generation Indian immigrant families who supposedly retained the plastic wrapping on their furniture and placed similar plastic runners on the carpets.
Where I grew up the target of the meme was Jewish and Polish people, not entirely immigrants.

For those insistent on ranting about kids today, I regret to inform you that comic books have been doing the same thing with terminal punctuation for sixty years, and for the same reason.