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And by Titans, I mean my husband and Maytag.

For the last two years and change, we’ve washed dishes by hand more often than not despite having a dishwasher. I can’t recall the exact date of what is shaping up to be an epic war of wit and will between Rob and the dishwasher(s), but we awoke this morning to yet another mechanical fail on the part of a Maytag appliance, which brings to mind a mental image of a not so lonely repairman hiding in a closet as the answer machine takes message after message from irate customers wondering where the hell he is.

Friday night, we watched the remake of the cult classic Clash of the Titans. It was a questionable family movie night pick with an eight year-old in the picture, but she is Greek mythology crazy and we decided to chance it.

The plot involved a fed up human race refusing to give the gods of Mount Olympus their due obeisance through prayers and sacrifice. A royally pissed off Zeus decides to “release the Kraken” on them as a reminder of the order of things.

It calls to mind that we are not as free of overlords demanding tribute in modern times as we think. Our daily lives are highly mechanized and dependent on gadgets and technology that free us from much of the mundane tasks of our grandparents.

The dishwasher is one I would rank as a chief among the many appliances that have unchained women from household drudgery.

It is not a maintenance free thing however and those with the ability and means to create and maintain dishwashers or washing machines, to name another huge time saver, demand worship in their own way.

After Rob checked to make sure that the power source was not the issue, he put in a call for service. The machine is just a month or so old and is under warranty. He initially met with a recording telling him to call again on Monday during this and that time. A quick Internet search led him to a 24hr line and he managed to secure a technician for a week from Monday. Warranty items are not priority and I wondered fleetingly what a family with small children would do if faced with a week sans dishwasher with both parents working?

Eat out, no doubt.

It’s interesting that this latest dishwasher outage arouses no particular ire in me. Though I was at the weary end of washing by hand this summer when the last dishwasher died and I was back to the sink, my first thought upon discovering the body this morning was to minimize Rob’s stress over it.

“Don’t freak out,” I told him when he got up. “But the dishwasher quit in mid-cycle over night.”

“We need to quit buying Maytag p.o.s’s,” he said.

“Or figure out which appliance god to offer sacrifice too,” I replied.

“This is not funny,” he said.

I guess it’s not. The time spent trying to ascertain if he could fix it took away from time he’d budgeted to putting up stone on the house because “I am not hauling all those rocks back to the truck for the winter.”

Life is never simple. But I guess it never was.

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