Came down a few moments ago to find the washing machine had not spun my load of shirts and wouldn’t open the door (it’s a front loader). Crap, thinks I…considering I might have to call for service and wondering how much of a bite that’ll take out of this month’s income.   I try a spin only cycle to see if that would jar it out of its state.   It rinses the load but the drum never moves.

Crap. Crap. Crap…

I have loved this new washer…an Electrolux.   It is the most amazingly water efficient thing I have ever seen.   No matter what sort of load I put in it the washer only uses just enough water to get everything nice and soaked, but there is never any excess I can see in the drum.   The clothes are just there in the drum, completely wet, but not actually tumbling in any water at the bottom of the drum.   It’s amazing to me.

And that of course, is because it’s completely computerized.   And I make my living in the IT world.   So what naturally comes to mind is…I go up upstairs, get the owners manual, go back downstairs to the washer and try unplugging it…waiting for a bit…and plugging it back in.   This allows me to get the door to unlock and I get my unspun and still soggy shirts out.   I close the door again, open the manual to the Installation Diagnostics page and make the washer go through its installation diagnostics.   I figure if nothing else at least I’ll have something, possibly some error code to tell the service folks when I call them.

But the washer goes through its diagnostics just fine, during which it fills and drains and the drum goes through all its movements like it’s supposed to.   At the end the display gives the washer a Passed All Tests.   So I put the unspun shirts back in, close the door and give it a Spin Only cycle, which also does a brief rinse. Works like it’s supposed to. Shirts are in the dryer now.

The poor dear had gotten confused somehow, and powering it down and back up cleared the problem. I rebooted my washing machine, in other words. Or in further words, I now own a washing machine that may need the occasional reboot. Well…but I learned to live with that when I got the new furnace   A computerized furnace.   But it measures the temperatures inside and outside of the house and can adjust the blower speed on a minutely variable scale as needed.   It builds up an internal history of how the house responds to outside changes in temperature and anticipates what is needed to maintain the temperature inside.   It’s lowered my energy bills considerably.   I’ve rebooted it a bunch of times since I had it installed six years ago.

I’m sure glad my life took me down the Earning A Living In IT route. I have No idea what people my age who have little to no experience diagnosing computer/software problems must be thinking when one of their new microchip controlled appliances starts acting funny, but I suspect it’s something like panic.