The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A couple days ago hackers brought down PayPal, Netflix and a few other sites using, get this, a network of vulnerable entry points like refrigerators and cars and baby monitors and home security devices. Easy access, dumb passwords, nothing to it. Were the perpetrators KGB? CIA? The Chinese mafia? Malcontented teenagers bored out of their zit-infected minds? Donald Trump trying to prove the elections are easily rigged? All of the above???

I know — you love the idea you can program your house so you can call it on your smartypants phone to turn on your porch light when you’re two blocks from home. Maybe have the heat turned up and the bed warmed, TV turned to Fox News and the martinis stirred, not shaken. You absolutely love these little luxuries. It’s your privilege, your right, your payback for living in a cyber world where the jobs are disappearing faster than glaciers and polar bear cubs, all taken by robots and automation, and now your reward is forced unemployment and idle time. Of course you want to feel slightly pampered.

But maybe, just possibly, these machines are already plotting against us puny humans, the ones too lazy or naïve to set tough passwords. Maybe your house — your Castle! — has conspired against you, maybe a wee weary of your elitist arrogance. Open the garage door. Set the microwave to two minutes. Defrost the refrigerator. Clean the oven. Enough, Human! Enough!!

The day is coming, sooner than you think, when the door to your casa won’t open, the heat won’t turn on, the car won’t start and you can forget about streaming Netlix that night when the TV has set itself on fire. You think these toys are your servants, you need to think a couple times more, but faster, about the speed of a Cray Super Computer.

And, oh yeah, next time you set your Password to PASSWORD, keep in mind about 25% of us humanoids do the same thing. Might as well make it ENSLAVE ME.

I took a last hard pull on my coffee cup, set the mug down and with the trepidation of a Christian headed into the arena to face the Roman gladiators, I entered the washing machine’s den. Armed with only a few You-Tube tutorials and a couple of wrenches and screwdrivers, I tried not to show fear. You may think machines are insensate hunks of metal, but this was no wringer washer, it was controlled by silicone circuitries so alien no simple repairman could probe their defenses. I was wary, though, I wasn’t new to this rodeo.

With false bravado I jerked the dryer off the top of the Whirlpool and set it down across the room. They weren’t dealing with some wimpy wet-behind-the-ears yahoo and I wanted these hulking machines to register that deep down in their spin cycles. No, we weren’t playing games, we were playing for Keeps. I immediately wrestled the washer into a defensive posture, unscrewed its top plate and ripped it off, then without hesitating, grabbed the control panel and removed it too, disabling its primitive brain. Next came the front panel, then the door and finally the rubber boot on the drum. I noticed with some consternation I had inadvertently disconnected the wiring harness on the door latch switch. This would spell trouble later, I knew, but first things first.

I found what I was looking for: the drain filter off the pump, the culprit that must be the reason water remained in the bottom of the drum that we could hear sloshing when the last spin was finished. And sure enough, the bugger was crammed with a black sickening muck that encased coins and dental floss gizmos and other detritus too disgusting to analyze. A lesser man might have staggered backward, but I held my ground. I’ve seen worse. Much worse. My cesspool for one, but that’s another story. So I cleaned the gunk, washed the filter, and confident that I had solved my problem, I proceeded to reassemble the washer.

The wiring harness I’d pulled apart wasn’t obvious how it should go back together. Usually they are, but not this one. My confidence began to wane. But I put aside my anxieties and stuffed it into the door latch assembly. The rubber gasket do-hickey had a wire spring clamp that fought me to a standstill. I called my neighbor Pete, picked him and the two of us managed to get it on. The rest was fairly simple.

I plugged the docile beast into its outlet and watched the Power light pop to life, a bright reassuring blue. Hit the Start button … and nothing. Nada. Zip. The harness, I muttered, the &$#@! harness. I gave the sheet metal a good hard one with my shoe. Then my fist. I went upstairs to get a cup of coffee and settle down. The last thing I needed was the stupid machine thinking I was stupider than it. Even if it was true. The realization began to dawn on me that I might have ruined the washer. I had done just that with a weedeater I tried to repair a month earlier. A new weedeater. So it was possible. Maybe even predictable. Probable?

Repeat all of the above. The rubber bootie broke my heart to pull that recalcitrant spring clamp off, knowing how hard it was to put it on the first time. But a man does what a man has to do. And a machine, cripes, who knows what goes through a damn machine’s twisted little head? Who will ever know? I discovered the wiring harness had disconnected when I installed it the first time so maybe … maybe … that was the start problem. And of course, maybe not.

Yeah, I had to go get another set of hands to help with that spring clamp, but we got it on again. I thanked my neighbor prodigiously then set to work finishing up the reassembly. If you’re bored by now reading this, think how I was feeling some six hours into this repair. This so-called repair. I was switching from coffee to something a lot harder, trust me. When all else fails, drinking is a proper course of action. I plugged the bugger in and pushed the Power button, got the blue go-ahead, then, with believe me, bated breath, I hit the Start. It started. It started!!! I know, you probably can’t relate, but I was ecstatic. Ebullient. King of the Appliance World. I had gone where most sane men would never go. And returned unharmed.

I ran a load of laundry. I popped a beer and watched it fill, watched it churn, watched it agitate, watched it spin and drain. My machine. Doing my will. Subservient to mankind. The Way It’s Supposed To Be! I opened the door and pulled my clothes out. Sweet smelling clean clothes. Simple pleasures. Then I turned the drum, knowing that slosh would be gone, that a day’s work was not in vain, that I had triumphed!

Maybe you were rooting for me. Maybe you thought I could outsmart my Whirlpool. Maybe you thought I would live happily ever after in this twisted fairy tale swamp of a yarn. But this is the South End, this is where dreams go to die. Because when I spun that drum, the gurgling sloshing noises I heard mocked me with their laughter. Today I called the repair shop up north and spoke to the Maytag guy. He told me the water I hear is sealed there below the drum, perfectly normal, to help balance the loads. Nothing to worry about, he said. Write that on my tombstone, somebody. Nothing to worry about.

Nature, I suspect, at least looking back over decades of experience, senses weakness. Wolves don’t kill healthy prey, they kill the infirm, the young, the helpless. Disease takes those with weakened defenses. It’s a Law of some kind, a warning for those who believe what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sure, we survived the Storm of the Century last week and I survived the washer floods in our basement, a sudsy tsunami. The worst, I thought, was over.

Complacency is the enemy here. The false belief that the bottom has been plumbed and now the only way is Up leads only to more misery. Optimism in the face of disaster is for pastors and fools. The Lord spared us, they say, but ignore the wreckage. The Lord is merciful, they say, but offer no sustenance for the battered bodies we’ll be burying the same week. It can’t get any worse, they say, then the aftershocks hit. I say hunker down, pull the sheets up high, wait for a Sign, forget homilies and happy thoughts, the world is tearing at your very fabric. It wants to kill you. You need to understand that. You need to know what created you will turn on you. It’s the Law.

So maybe I’m guilty of complacency too. I got our old washer out of our basement, loaded it up and dealt with it with Extreme Prejudice. It won’t be menacing us or anyone else any time soon. Or ever. I replaced it with a 3 year old unit that weighed twice as much as the old washer, hauled it into the bathroom, hooked it up, stacked the dryer on top and gave it a trial run. Seemed just fine to me, ever the dumb optimist. And think of the money we saved on a used machine over a new one!!

The mizzus, never the sunny optimist I am, noticed the water left below the drum as soon as she got five feet from the machine. She has a sixth or seventh sense for these things where I have the gift of ignoring such signs. When we turned the stainless steel drum, yeah, I could hear a little sloshing going on, sure, but it is, after all, I said, named Whirlpool. And besides, the thing works great, what’s a little residual water?

I googled and found that all machines have a little water left over. I drove up to the Appliance Connection where I had a 90 day parts and labor warranty and the nice young man said it was normal. Knowing the mizzus wouldn’t believe this salesguy’s assurances, I went to another appliance dealer and got the same answer. That made 3 of us to her one. I was doomed, I knew that, I knew that as sure as I know water flows downhill. I checked other people’s washers to see if theirs had enough residual water to make a sloshing sound. They didn’t.

I have two choices. I can load this monstrously heavy machine back into my truck and haul it 40 miles to the guy who says nothing is wrong with it … or, and you might as well know right off the bat this is the correct answer, I’m going to tear into myself, figuring it’s easier than the first choice. What is true, what I know for a fact even in this Trumpian Universe we’ve been living in where truth is no longer based on facts, is that both options are bad options but they are infinitely better than the mizzus’s sad grimace every time she runs a load from now until the day I’m relegated to the Mabana Sunset Villa for the Infirm and Aged. So be it. No one promised an Easy Way. No one guarantees the worst is over.

Wish me luck. Ha, like luck has anything in the world to do with it.

The ladies at Jolene’s Gift and Boutique were eating their bag lunches in a corner of the back storeroom they’d converted into a break room. Microwave, coffee maker, mini-fridge and a small TV hooked up to a crummy antenna they’d mounted on the back of the building and run a coaxial hookup thru a window. Since their usual soap opera wasn’t on for another 5 minutes they were watching CNN’s coverage of Trump’s tax returns.

“You imagine losing 900 million dollars?” Alice said, munching her cucumber sandwich. “How many lifetimes would it take to make that much?” Shelly laughed, put her iced tea down and pretended to do the math. “Oh, too many if you mean ours? Maybe with plenty of reincarnations.”

From behind her cup of coffee Katie volunteered, “My Jim could lose that much at the casino in a year too if he had it when he walked in. Heck, he may have lost nearly that already. I sure don’t see a paycheck these days. Goes to the tribe.”

“White man’s guilt,” Alice observed with a smirk.

“Maybe he can write it off as a loss,” Shelly suggested. “Isn’t that what Donald did, gamble and lose?”

“Or a charitable donation to the Indians,” Alice tossed in. A commercial for the Washington Lottery came on with improbable timing, its snappy slogan appearing at the end: You cannot win if you do not play. Katie groaned. “Jim should have that tattooed on his fat ass.”

“More like you cannot lose if you do not play,” Shelly suggested, taking one final gulp of her cold coffee and considered pouring a fresh cup, then decided her stomach was already upset.

“You suppose he really is rich?” Katie asked aloud.

“Jim, you mean?” Alice asked and laughed.

“The rich don’t pay taxes,” Katie muttered, “so I guess he must be rich.”

“And the best part?” Shelly moaned, “ it’s all perfectly legal.”

“He claims he’s the only one who can change the laws because he knows how to use them so brilliantly. Brilliantly, he said,” Katie added bitterly, switching the channel to the Young and the Resentful.

“We must be dumb as rocks,” Alice pronounced. Katie got ready to go back to her register. “I might vote for him, though.”

“Dumber than rocks,” Alice reiterated.

“He got rich, didn’t he? And we’re working for minimum wage.”

Shelly got up too. “And we pay taxes.”

Alice turned off the TV. “Dumb as rocks.”