visual demonstrations and reverse engineering
Tue 2015-09-08 23:58:36 (in context)
We have a working washing machine again! I'm going to wash all of the clothes tomorrow. And the towels. And my exercise pants. And etcetera.
It was, as suspected, just a matter of replacing the lid sensor switch. Very simple--only, like I said before, I wasn't going to mess with it and maybe mess things up with either it or our home warranty policy or both. So today we had a visit from an appliance technician who opened things up, confirmed that it really was just the lid sensor switch and nothing else, and replaced that switch for us. And we gave him a check for the amount of the warranty co-pay.
And life was once more that particular sort of good that you get when you can wash your clothes without leaving the house, paying attention to business hours, and/or scrounging quarters.
The fun part was getting to see what the washing machine looked like under the hood. Our model requires one to pop off the end-caps of the front panel in order to reveal the access screws, then unscrew those screws to flip up the front panel, then simply walk off the entire chassis and lid. I didn't realize how little solid machine there was inside the big white aluminum rectangle--it's just a big flimsy metal box that gives the washtub somewhere to live. And also the lid sensor; the bit the technician replaced seemed to be attached to the inside of the chassis there.
It's OK if you're not getting a perfect visualization of the machine's innards from that abomination of a paragraph. Point is--OK, so, I'm thinking of one of John's T-shirts. The one with the slogan, "The insides of things are beautiful. Let's see what they look like." I'm feeling that slogan so very much right now.
There is probably a metaphor for writing in there somewhere. Something about the literary equivalent of taking it apart and finding out what the insides look like: examining the author's choices on a line-by-line level, or watching how they make two themes interact, or spotting that clever bit of foreshadowing on the reread. And sometimes you can't quite figure out how to take the story apart until you've had a chance to discuss it with someone else, or read an insightful review, and then you go, "Oh! So that's how you open it up and get at the lid sensor switch!" Something like that, anyway.
It's not "overthinking it." It's reverse engineering.