A few months ago, I was sitting home on a Sunday much like today. I had no plans for the day, which is always nice. The only thing I had to do was a bunch of laundry and iron my clothes for work on Monday. I went downstairs and put a load on and went back upstairs and was messing about online.

After an hour or so, I decided to go downstairs and move my laundry into the dryer and put the next load on, and from the top of the stairs, I knew there was a problem. We ended up with 2” of water on the floor because the washing machine did not shut off and overflowed, and overflowed and overflowed. I called the landlord and they said they would send someone out on Monday to fix the washer. That still left me with a lot of water to push out, and mop up and clean up.

Since then, I haven't really trusted the washer, and would sort of babysit it to make sure it didn't happen again. My vigilance paid off last week as it did it again. This time I caught it before it escaped beyond Seb's bathroom. I mopped it all up and called the landlord who sent someone out to fix it the next day or so. I called them on Friday to see if it was safe to use the washer again and they said yes it was fixed.

Because my trust was waning, I stood there and watched it fill up with water. When it got to the top of the tub and hadn't started yet, I shut it off. I called them back again and they said “oh, well it's Saturday, we'll send someone over on Monday” and I said “No.” She called back about 10 minutes later and asked if someone would be home this afternoon, as she found someone to come out and take a look. I said I would wait here for someone to show up, and they showed at about 3:15.He found a nick in the hose that controls the water level, which the previous two guys must not have found.

Talk about making a control overly complex. Instead of a simple float switch, like in a toilet, this washing machine has a tube that connects from the bottom of the tub all the way up to the water level/load size control panel. As water fills up in the tub, it forces water into the tube, compressing the air that's in there. The water level sensor shuts off the water based upon the increased pressure in the tube. Turn the knob to 'large load' and it takes a higher pressure to shut off the water. The only problem was that this tiny pinhole in the hose was bleeding pressure and therefore there was never enough pressure in the hose to tell the water level sensor to shut off (unless the water level in the whole apartment raised 4 feet or so and the pressure sensor itself was under water, but thankfully it never came to that). After some duct tape and some testing, we came to the conclusion that the washer would work properly if set to medium or small loads temporarily and he would get a new hose on Monday and come and install it then.

The third strike was actually at work. I'm on call this weekend and got a call about a web application not working properly. I rebooted the web server, and since it was notorious for taking a long time to shut down and start up, I left it for awhile. 30 minutes later it was still unresponsive, so I deciced to head into town and check out the console, knowing full well that Murphy's Law states that by the time you get there, it would have fixed itself. As I pulled up to the building, I remember hoping to myself that someone was already there and I wouldn't have to deal with the alarm system. My hopes fell on deaf ears as the parking lot was abandoned when I pulled in. I unlocked the door and pulled it open... and was confronted by a scene from Waterworld. My jaw hit the floor (splash) and then I remembered the alarm, so I ran, splashing, through the office and disarmed the alarm, and then followed the sound of running water to the men's bathroom and an overflowing toilet. I turned it off at the valve and stopped the water, but by now there was a good 2” of water on the floor throughout the office. ¡Ay Carumba! I made a few phone calls to alert management and meanwhile set about trying to rescue as many PCs as I could that were sitting on the floor... with the power still on. I used a pencil to flip off power strips and unplugged the CPUs and put them up on tables and tucked up the cables to prevent them from sitting in the water while it was cleaned up.

SO hopefully now that it's happened to me (or at least I've discovered the floods three times) that I wont have to deal with it again for a long, long time.

We now rejoin our regularly scheduled Sunday already in progress.