What owning a Maytag Dishwasher taught me

I love my Maytag dishwasher. I bought it brand new in the box from my local Lowes when I fried the motor on the one I originally purchased for my home at the Sears Outlet in Santa Ana. The old one was horrible. It never seemed to get the dishes clean enough. It was noisy and made cleaning my dishes more of a chore than it had to be. I like things that are effective, efficient and work well, don't we all?

You see, without the benefit of rubber gloves, my hands have a chemical reaction to hand dish washing detergent, so having a dishwashing machine is almost a necessity for me. I attribute this affliction to using industrail strengh dish sanitizer when I used to work for Jack In The Box in Riverside oh so many years ago.

When I forget to use the gloves, I get what looks like water blisters on the third pad of my middle and ring fingers, mostly. I lance it, drain it, bandage it up and wait for it to heal.

So when I went to lpush in the top rack after loading it up the other day for me to be able to close the sleek black glass door, which happens to match my oven by the way, I was crushed to find one of the plastic gray wheels which rides inside the rail was busted. The rack jolted down and out of place in such a way that the door refused to close. I was able to gently position the rack into its proper position and then resume my plans to wash yet another loads of dishes.

So what to do next to get this problem repaired? I figure its a Maytag - they must have an excellent parts and service section on thier very own website right? No! You can absolutely find a service center or their 800 number to request service, but no parts like I thought they would have.

Now what do I do? Well, Sears is the major distrubutor for Maytag, so I thought I'd atleast try the sears.com website. Bingo! I input my model number and the result is the subcomponents list I was hoping for. Oh, things are looking up now. I click on the rack and track assembly link and on the next page, there is a parts list on top that correlate to the beautiful exploded view of my rack and I can readily identify that part #23 is the one that broke.

O.K, my part is $2.97 for 1 unit. With shipping and tax, my repair will cost about $10.00 and the part will be here on the 18th. Nice! Back to being happy.