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DurgaPuja 2020

Bengali Handyman

Nilay Mukherjee, Boston, MA

We live in an age of specialization. Yet we resent it deeply when we see a specialist - say, a plumber do
something in 15 minutes and charge us $300 dollars for it. We of course, conveniently forget the time it
took for him to get to our house and back.

Thank God no one can easily see what it is I do to earn my salary- thanks to Covid, my boss’s daughter
thinks daddy just talks to people all day and gets paid a lot of money for it - which is essentially a
correct observation from the point of view of a ten-year-old regarding the job of a VP of a major
corporation.

At any rate, my story began last week when I noticed that the door on my washer was stuck shut after
what seemed like my wash cycle was over. Bummer. I yanked on it until I was sure that if I yanked
harder, the handle would break. I thought of calling for help- but the specter of losing three hundred
dollars was too much for me - and I decided to take the high road of self help.

A few YouTube videos later, I found a work around - it could be the door latch - just turn off the power
to the washer, wait a min and turn it back on. It resets stuff and the door should open!
It worked! I breathed a sigh of relief - the clothes were a little soggier than usual - but I had saved $300!
Yes!

By next week the problem was back - except when I repeated my trick and opened the washer door,
there was a pool of water in there. I had to haul everything out, take them to the bathtub, rinse,
squeeze the water out and then throw the clothes in the dryer. Bummer!

More YouTube videos. It could be that the drain filter was clogged, or the drain pump was not working.
Ok- but now this means taking shit apart and taking a look! And here- model matters. There are front
loaders, top loaders, and all kinds of companies out there and each model has these things in a
different place.

I hunted down the manual for my precise model - it turns out there are websites that will sell you parts
for it and coach you how to replace stuff in their videos - pretty cool.
Access is the next issue - my washer-dryer is in a closet, dryer on top of washer, and it seemed like I had
to open the back panel to get to the pump. Ok.

The closet is narrow, and I am fat - there was no way I could squeeze back there. I pulled the whole
thing forward and immediately the exhaust duct of the dryer fell out of the wall - it was barely held in
place with a ring clamp. I got a folding table and set it up so that I could offload the dryer onto it before
I could get the washer out. I look back there and discover my screwdrivers were not the right kind.

I need Torx heads - ok- I order a set on Amazon and for the next 5 days the dryer sat on the folding
table and impeded my path to the kitchen. No matter - I am doing this myself! Self help! Yeah!

Central Ohio Bengali Cultural Association