Monopoly!

I looked at all the blogs that I ordinarily read. Guess what? Nobody's posted anything new in a few days! They're all too busy cleaning for Pesach. Fortunately, I had coffee tonight, so I'm raring to go, and my back hurts enough that the bendy work is completely out of the question...

So... it's time to blog! And I have the monopoly. My readers have no other blogs to read!

So I can bore you all with details about how I washed out my microwave even though we have a whole other microwave for Pesach... Or I can warn you that it's not a good idea to pour water into the oven to clean it. I could even tell you about the amount of stuff that I still have to do tomorrow.

But I think I'll relate a nice story instead. Many many years ago (I think 6 or 7), my mother ran her wonderful self-cleaning oven and it self-cleaned. The next day, she wiped it out. Then she left her shiny, clean oven waiting for Pesach cooking. The morning of Erev Pesach, she turned on her oven to start her roast, and... it didn't work. She quickly called the first repairman whose number she could find. Claude (yes, that's his name) amazingly was there within about 30 minutes, isolated the problem quickly, and within another 20 minutes, the oven was working again.

We've had Claude repair other poorly behaved appliances since. He fixed a fuse on my oven a few years back, and declared my dryer dead about 8 months ago (he said he could fix it, but the price of the repair wasn't enough less than the price of a new dryer.) So, when my washer stopped wringing out my clothes - leaving everything sopping wet, I said "0k, I'm going to call Claude." Yaakov, in his best Tim Allen imitation, decided that he was going to fix it. Which meant that he somehow got the entire floor soaked, and then declared that he needed more tools, so he'd have to do it the next day. Well... this is the week before Pesach. I really couldn't do without a washer while he was at work the next day. So I woke up and called Claude. I started to describe the problem...

"Wait, what kind of washer do you have?"
"Spectra, I think"
"Front or top load?"
"Front"
"Okay, there's a panel on the bottom right. Open it. Turn the round thing. The filter should come off. Is it dirty?"
"Yeah, filthy"
"Okay, empty it out into the trash, put it back in, and have a chag sameach!"

I was in shock. I mean, firstly, who knew that washers have filters?! I knew about dryers, but washers?! Second, that was just REALLY REALLY nice of him. He could have come out and "fixed" the machine and charged for labor, and been completely honest about it and I wouldn't have felt ripped off. So now, I know exactly who to call tomorrow morning about the oven that shorted out the whole house... I don't think there's an electricity filter in the oven...