Latest in the power saga… the power company got back to me to say that during their monitoring, the power had not exceeded the Australian standard (of 254 volts). And interestingly, I found a snippet on a web site that said my long-suffering monitor should work fine up to 264 volts.
So I took it to another monitor repair place last week. A day later they rang to say it was ready. In fact, they rang again this morning. I’m impressed with this mob. Unlike the others, who claimed to have rung, they never actually did. These guys however, have rung twice. Hopefully they’ve actually fixed it too. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.
Of course, it would be too easy if my appliance hassles magically went away. So yesterday, the washing machine
started playing up. Not draining water out properly. I did various fiddling with the front of it during the day, then after poring through the manual and asking whoever looked like they might know about such things for advice, tried to get round the back where the pipes and things are. More fiddling ensued, until I found a pipe I wanted to take off and fiddle with, but couldn’t. Too tightly attached. Ah, just get a wide adjustable spanner thingy. Oh. No spanner thingy.
Did I ever actually have a spanner thingy? I don’t recall. Since I had to do some supermarket shopping anyway, I went out to the much-bigger-but-further-than-my-usual-supermarket Coles, on the off chance that they might have one. They didn’t. And they didn’t have a bunch of other stuff I wanted. Either that or I couldn’t find it, which is possible. So I ended up stopping past my usual Safeway
supermarket too.
So I got back home, and still no spanner. It was around 10:30pm, but I really wanted to try and solve the washing machine mystery that night. So I got back in the car and headed to Southland K-Mart, one of the few that are open 24 hours a day. Very handy at times like these, when you simply must have a spanner. Indeed, they had the very thing, and obviously the gods were smiling on me for making such an effort to find one so late at night, because when I got to the cash register I discovered it was 20% off.
Back home again, and I discovered that the fiddling with the spanner didn’t actually make a lot of difference. Maybe the gods weren’t smiling at me after all, maybe they were pointing and laughing. But I did a lot more fiddling, and eventually got the water out of the machine and the clothes rinsed and spin-dried. It was definitely bedtime by that point. Hopefully next time I go to use it, it’ll behave itself a bit better.
10pm update: It didn’t.
