At what point does it stop being a theory and start being an actual conspiracy?
I only ask because my kitchen appliances are out to get me. My refrigerator and dishwasher are clearly in cahoots.
Both were going along fine, for the most part, cooling food and cleaning dishes, respectively. And then, they both decided to break at the same time.
Don't tell me it was a coincidence. I've seen them whispering to the stove and the microwave when they thought I wasn't looking.
They have been subtle about it, too. Nothing as obvious as completely stopping. Instead, their simultaneous deterioration has been slow but precipitous.
Take the dishwasher. It isn't entirely broken. It is still working. And by "still working," I mean that I turned it on three hours ago and it is still working.
It didn't use to take this long. It was always a bit _ let's say leisurely _ in its cleaning. It took perhaps a full two hours to process through a load of dishes.
The extra hour of cleaning it takes now makes absolutely no difference in my life. It is not as if someone is going to break down my door and threaten to do violence to me if I don't have clean dishes in two hours.
But it is still annoying.
Which brings me to the refrigerator. The fridge is on the fritz. Or, specifically, it is just the ice-maker, which isn't making any ice.
Do I need an ice-maker to make ice? I do not. I still have a couple of those old plastic ice-cube trays that work perfectly fine. Aesthetically, I even prefer the shape they make to the shape that comes from the automatic machine.
And filling the ice cube trays is not much of a burden. It is even less of a burden than doing the dishes by hand.
But a broken ice maker brings with it a potential benefit. Rather than paying a couple of hundred bucks to have it fixed, we could spend a fortune and buy a whole new refrigerator.
We hate the refrigerator we have; somehow it has less space than it seems. Or at least significantly less stuff fits into it than it should. Other refrigerators we have had were the French door style, with two refrigerator doors on top and one freezer drawer on the bottom. That layout maximizes space.
But we weren't going to buy a new fridge until the old one died, and the old one looked as if it were going to go on forever. After the apocalypse, it would be standing alone in a desert wasteland keeping beer cold for the cockroaches that survived nuclear annihilation.
So excited were we about the possibility of buying a French-door fridge that, in our enthusiasm, we spoke of it openly in front of our iceless refrigerator.
That did it. The next day, it started producing ice again.
I can't say I was surprised. This is the sort of treatment I expect from appliances. Many years ago, we had a computer printer that died. We bought a new printer and were preparing to install it when suddenly the first printer, apparently chastened, came back to life and started printing again. It worked fine for another seven or eight years.
I expect a similar resurrection from the refrigerator, and who knows what will happen with the dishwasher?
All I know is that last night, as I turned off the lights and went to bed, I could swear I heard the toaster oven snickering.
