Last weekend the ultimate catastrophe occurred. The washing machine broke. Now you may be able to take that in your stride as a little inconvenience until it is repaired, but for me it is calamity, the ultimate apocalypse. I already had washing mounting up to rival Vesuvius, and another days delay would see an avalanche of linen and a tsunami of towels. Of course it was a weekend, where I am at my busiest and the rest of the world decides to take those days off. So I decided to fix the machine myself as I have done before. The problem is that it would not do the spin cycle. I tried it on every part of every cycle. Dead as a maggot. (don’t know where that expression came from because in my experience, when things are dead, maggots are very active). So I up-ended it and polished up all the connection terminals (about 40) using a dremel with a tiny diamond burr for the males and a tiny rat’s tail for the females. Ain’t that a metaphor for a man’s world. Males get diamonds and females get rat tails. Cleaning terminals has worked before, but here my electrical expertise failed me.
So bright and early Monday morning I headed into Atherton to buy a new appliance. It is quite possible the old one could be repaired, but I needed an immediate solution. I found that “bright and early” doesn’t work in Atherton. The appliance shops don’t open until 9 am when the day is half over, so I kick my heels, fill up on fuel, read mail, do sudoku etc until the sales staff drift in. They would find another definition of ‘the working day’ if they worked on a farm, which starts when you can see your hand in front of your face.
The appliances on offer were all electronically controlled with comprehensive sounding but unfathomable specifications. Which lead me to the conclusion that I wasn’t meant to understand, I was meant to be impressed. So I bought one tempted by price and stated capacity of 10kg. I removed the fantastic amount of cardboard and expanded polystyrene that would have safely landed the appliance to a bounce landing on Mars, to find a gleaming white Tardis. I was to find out later that despite not being dark blue, it did indeed have time travel capability.
My first job for this machine was to spin dry a load previously washed but caught in the rain on the washing line and now had to be spin-dried before being put in the dryer. I examined the cycles available (12) and the settings available, 6 functions by 4 possibilities each which comes to 288 even before I explored the possibility of doing things in a different order. I did not manage to find the critical path through the “fuzzy logic” programming. Had to run the whole cycle from wash. There are also a whole heap of things I can’t do if I select a cycle. Certain settings are forbidden and blanked out. The operating instructions mentions a few, but I think it would take a flowchart the size of my veranda to define the options available. I have later discovered the ‘progress’ button which may enable me to navigate my way to a spin only solution, but may vastly multiply the 288 things that can already happen.
Recently I noticed that the ‘time to finish’ display was not a clock. It showed 16 mins, then I went off to do something and it showed 13 mins. No, I was away longer than that. Then I came back and it showed 18 mins. Hence the reference to the Tardis. Perhaps fuzzy logic, like quantum computing, are incredibly powerful tools to arrive at the wrong answer.
So I feel rather helpless. At the mercy of the machine and it’s manufacturers. And I like to consider myself amongst the technologically literate. But I am falling behind. I am sure that most of the people gave up long ago , but I am still striving and struggling to comprehend. I really need a conceptual model in my head of how things work to be able to cope with the world. I think I will have to give up my pretense of understanding everything and admit that I only understand little bits here and there.
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