good for birthin babies and washin dishes and that's about it

And the verdict is:
A sock in the pump. A tiny black sock snaked its way over the rim of the washer tub and into the drain pump. Seventy dollars and a new timer later, we called in the Big Gun, and within 20 minutes my dad had the front of the machine open, the pump disconnected, and sock diagnosis.

And today is the day I admit that I am not Gregory House. I’m the worker bee. I’m the bench mechanic. You tell me what to do. I’ll go buy a book and dive in. I can replace a part. I can tear it open and put it back together. But I’m a shitty, shitty diagnostician. (To be fair, it was Big Gun (ak.a. Dad) who first diagnosed the broken washer as a bad timer)

And also? I’m so stubborn and DIY that I will spend hours and hours on things much better left to the guys who do the shit every day. Once I wasted an entire afternoon changing the oil in my 1986 Cougar, a car whose master cylinder and starter I had already replaced. I didn’t have ramps! I had no strap wrench! Once I did get the oil drained out, I had no disposal plan!

I find myself in this place often, having just enough ambition and knowledge around a tool kit so that I can readily and quickly get into trouble, but not much follow through and definitely not quite enough practical skill to get through some tasks. Oh, I can pull apart a computer and switch out parts; I can solder speaker wire to a motherboard to hardwire the power into a laptop. I can wire a light fixture and install a ceiling fan. But the question remains: is it worth it? Because I will tell you a secret, Internet. It might take me a half hour to wire a simple fixture, once I find the right pliers and haul out the ladder and figure out which breaker to switch off and then climb back down the ladder so that I can find the right wirenuts and then find a TALLER ladder since I’m too short to get the leverage for the torque of the screws…. You get the idea.

So today I’m all happy because I’ve now watched my dad pull the pump out of the washer and so now I can pull a pump out of a washer, and I’m like “cool one more probably useless but possibly important piece of repair information for my arsenal” and that’s when he told me that every washing machine is different and sure if this exact machine breaks again I’m good to go but some of them have pumps on a separate drive and attached to the motor, and some other mechanical information that I don’t remember because I tuned out after “all washers are different” and that’s why I don’t have the head for – well, really for anything.

Hello, I’m Useless MomBot today.