Why yes I am feeling more chipper, thank you for asking. And, I have successfully battle a misbehaving machine twice in as many days, and for now it’s submitting to my will and working like a good little washer should.
How did it break? well, I am partially an idiot. Not a full idiot, but somewhere in the ancestry there was a full-blown fool and I have a few of his dumb genes. I put a small piece of carpet into the washing machine. It had been peed on by a cat who is too dumb to successfully pee in the very large box in front of the aforementioned carpet. Her butt must have been hanging out just a little and she didn’t notice or care that her urine was errantly spilling to the carpet. So, I put the carpet in the washing machine and went back to playing games with the little dude.
When I returned later, I found the remnants of the carpet sitting in a pool of water in the washer. It seems the wash dissolved the cheap glue holding the carpet together, and now the sump was filled with carpet thread and grit. So, once the wife returned and took over kid duty, I dismantled the washing machine. I had done this once before, so I wasn’t terrified of the unknown. I set to work with a grim determination and a partially misplaced hatred of the cat.
2 hours later, the washing machine was put back together and functioning. Well, it functioned until the end of the second load. I was pretty sure that it was going to break again-there had been so much residual silt and carpet hair in the bottom of the drum that I couldn’t reach that it all plugged the sump again. So today, after I made the family dinner and ate it with them, I rolled up the old sleeves and dove into the machine’s guts again. Only took an hour this time, and boy do I feel manly.But boy, do I hope I don’t have to do that again anytime soon.
Chris Loblaw, Author 
Now if I do something as ‘interesting’ as that, I have to call a guy to fix the damn thing. So, revel in your manliness – I sure would! 🙂