Go Home Dishwasher, You're Drunk!

   I have a complicated relationship with dishwashers (the machine kind). Growing up, we had a dishwasher but we never ever used it upon my mother's insistence that it was "broken" because the one time she tried to use it it "exploded". Okay, cool, whatever. At my apartment, we have a dishwasher that we thought was broken, but it turns out it just wasn't switched on... Today my roommates and I got more acquainted with our dishwasher than we would have liked.

   For a couple days we've been noticing this funky rotten egg smell in our kitchen. We thought it was the sink/drain so we've been leaving lemon wedges in the grate, pouring hot water down it- all those fun activities that people love to do on their spare time. Today though, we were in for a fun surprise when we discovered the funky smell was actually coming from the dishwasher. My roommate opened it only to be overcome with the staggering egg smell- I believe there were literal stink waves cruising through the air, it was that bad- whose source appeared to be the pool of brownish water chilling in the bottom of the dishwasher. The smell was foul, almost as bad as that time I nearly drank rotten apple juice (stay tuned for that story!). 

   Being the positive, seekers of silver linings that we are, we were stoked to have found the source of the stench. Easy fix too, we'll just run the dishwasher to clean it out, we thought. We thought wrong. When we started running the machine, all the suds started pouring out of the dishwasher. Our first line of defence were bundles of dishtowels bunched under the machine- these served well for about two seconds. Next, my roommates approached the satanic dishwasher armed with a dustpan for scooping out the soap suds which were then emptied into the sink repeatedly. Eventually we located some tupperware and put them under the dishwasher and they fared a little bit better than our previous ideas. 

   Epilogue: Once the rinse cycle was finished we confirmed that the drain was clogged and had to remove the pool of dirty water in the dishwasher via variously sized tupperware. I think the moral of the story here is that tupperware is a lifesaver, and that dish racks like to take baths.