World domination through faulty workmanship

I just used a pressure washer to clean the silverware basket that belongs in my dishwasher.  I don’t know if the basket is rated for that type of trauma, but I do know my body is not black mold resistant. Marketing paraphernalia for my appliance sanitize cycle, rated by the NSF International to eliminate 99.9% of common household bacteria, fails to mention that the warmth creates a safe haven for fungi. It practically invites them to dinner.

I can’t clean my front-loading laundry machine with the pressure washer since my husband objects to using it inside the house. Chicken.  So instead, I leave the door open or it, too, becomes a refuge for smelly  microorganisms.  Instead of invading us, China can save their resources and poison us with naturally-occurring fungi in our appliances. It’s brilliant if you think about it - world domination through faulty workmanship.

I don’t remember having these problems when we were younger. Maybe I’ve reached the age where everything in the past is glorified (for those of you who haven’t reached it yet, it starts around 36), but my parents owned one washer and one dryer the entire time when I was growing up. I’ve gone through 3 sets in the past 8 years. I’m also on dishwasher number 3. I know I’m not alone since one of my best friends was bitching about her third dishwasher in as many years as well. That’s 2 for 2. If you consider us a subset of standard US homeowners, you can infer 100% of homes own crap appliances, statistically speaking. Someone should hire me off that data analysis alone.

When I look to my engineering colleagues for advice, they offer few answers. Most of them were smart enough to marry for money. The others immediately saw the income potential in sales and jumped in bed with the enemy. They knew their fancy technical engineering-school jargon would give them an edge in confusing the customer, not to mention the HR rep who interviewed them. 

Am I helping the economy with my appliance purchases? Only if we’re trying to increase the import % of our GDP. Why are our products less reliable than those built 30 years ago? I don’t consider myself a great patriot, but it would be nice if we could go back to building things that actually work here in our own country. And don’t tell me we don’t have the brainpower. My friends are all wasting theirs on social media, frustrated because they’ve sold out to sell crap, because that’s all that’s out there. If someone, anyone, was capable of looking past quarterly profits to long-term reliability, they’d have a customer base of the entire fucking USA.

Don’t give me a crap, cotton, Made-in-America t-shirt. Give me a washer with no electronic bells and whistles with a motor that runs. It doesn’t have to play the fucking star-spangled banner every time I turn it on. It just has to wash my clothes so I don’t have to sit at the sink, scrubbing the fungus-stains out of our not-so-clean clothing like my great-grandma used to do in her front yard with a basin. 

But what do I know? I’m just a stay-at-home mom writing this shit in my basement. Because my kids locked me down here.