Thursday, 24th May 2001.
Dishwasher

It started of as a fiendishly clever plan, and ended up a disaster.

We had a dinner party on Tuesday night (oh Ian you are so mature!) for six people. Proceedings didn't finish until well after midnight, and there was no chance of the mountain of dirty dishes getting done that night.

When I returned home from work on Wednesday, I decided to make a start on the washing up before the soccer started on tv. Then Emma had an idea. Our downstairs neighbour was away for a couple of weeks, and Emma had the key to her flat. And said neighbour has a dishwasher!

It took us a few trips to move all the dirty dishes from our kitchen to the dishwasher. We couldn't find any dishwasher powder, so at Emma's instruction I grabbed our washing-up detergent from the kitchen. Emma sprayed a bit inside the dishwasher, and eventually we set it going.

Later on Wednesday night Emma asked me if I had a torch. She needed to borrow it to check on the dishwasher downstairs. Why? Because the lights in the kitchen downstairs don't work.

Some time later Emma returned. "THERE WERE SUDS ALL OVER THE FLOOR!" Apparently Emma had nearly fallen on her arse when she set foot in the kitchen. There was a layer of suds fanning out from the front of the dishwasher. "I think I may have overdone the washing-up liquid..."

We have run the rinse cycle several times since. This evening we both went down there and scooped a mountain of suds out of the inside of the machine. After an evening of rinse cycles and suds removal we gave up, and pulled all the plates and cutlery etc out of the dishwasher, and had to wash them by hand. Bugger.