The mice have eaten my dishwasher

Last Wednesday evening, having tidied up all the dinner dishes, put the dishwasher on and settled down to watch something on TV, Andrew and I suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of gushing water, and the TV went off.  Within seconds Madeleine popped out to the living room, saying that the lights in her room had gone off too.  The  dishwasher had also stopped the nice quiet wooshing sound it makes as it cleans dishes, so with some trepidation, we approached the kitchen to investigate.

Just then, a torrent of water washed across the kitchen floor.  After a bit of flustering around with towels, we gingerly peeked into the cupboard under the sink, and discovered that some dasterdly mice had eaten through both the dishwasher drainpipe and the casing around an electric cable right next to it.  As the water drained through the pipe, it had burst out all over the exposed electric cable, tripping the fuses for half the house and thankfully cutting off the power straight away.

Knowing that water and electricity are a bad combination, we turned all the plugs in the cupboard off and left it to dry out. 

Now, at this point I just have to reiterate, for those who remember the Great Rat Saga of 2007, that yes, these were definintely mice in our cupboard.  Don’t take my word for it, Andrew had actually seen them.  And laid poison for them, but these mice were hardy little suckers and although they might be dead now, they obviously didn’t go down without leaving a little reminder of their stay.  I never saw or heard them, and wouldn’t have known they were there but for Bess (our dog) spending the last two weeks with her nose jammed up against the skirting boards beneath the dishwasher.  She was terribly excited and could obviously hear and smell them, but to her eternal regret never laid a single paw on one.

She had the same frustration with the Great Rat Saga of 2007, when we live in Wellington.   One morning Bess went mad sniffing and scratching around the couch.  She did this often, usually because her tennis ball had got wedged behind it, and I pulled the couch away from the wall to see what was there.  To my great horror, I found two fat brown mice scurrying around.  I screamed, ran away, and hollared for Andrew to come to my rescue.  The next half an hour are a little embarassing to recall, suffice to say I wouldn’t let Andrew leave the house until the couch was outside, because although he saw one mouse sprinting for freedom towards an open door, I was convinced that the second mouse had got inside the lining underneath the couch and was lurking about, waiting to spring forth as soon as I sat down.

Over the course of the day, I occasionally went outside the inspect the couch, hoping to find some evidence it was mouse-free.  Eventually, with my heart in my mouth I took a stanley knife and cut the lining from underneath the couch, exposing absolutely no mice, and at the end of the day I grudgingly conceeded it could come back into the house. 

We liberally threw mouse poison through the holes behind drawers and cupboards in the kitchen that we figured had let the mice in.  I told a few people about this (to me) perilous experience, and they all, to a man and woman, a) guffawed loudly and told me that they were rats, not mice, and b) guffawed some more, and told me there were never 2 rats, but more likely 20 rats.  Needless to say I refused to belive them and when Andrew heard a soft thud behind a kitchen wall a week or so later, we figured it was the last mouse body hitting the floor, and I relaxed.

Another few days passed, and I was pottering around the kitchen getting ready for friends to come over for morning tea, when I opened a drawer and found, curled up on an oven glove (my favourite oven glove, in the shape of a frog that we got in Fiji) an enormous dead rat.  I let rip an almighty scream, slammed the drawer shut and spent the next ten minutes trying to convince myself I could get rid of it.  But I couldn’t, and when my friends turned up I decided to just keep quiet and wait til the end of the day when Andrew could get rid of it.

But Phillippa and Maree politely inquired after the health of the local rats, and unable to lie I confessed that actually, there was a corpse lying in the drawer right now, but I didn’t have the guts to get rid of it.  Phillippa is terribly practical and likes to help out, so she immediately leapt up and promised to play undertaker.  I equipped her with multiple plastic bags and left her to it.  Maree lurked nearby, eager to see the rat but not actually get involved.

I have to confess, I was a little pleased by their reaction - as soon as Practical Phillippa opened the drawer and clocked the size of the beast, both she and Maree screamed, slammed the drawer, and fled the kitchen.   Aha!  Now we had three women who couldn’t get rid of the rat!  Once Maree and Phillippa had calmed down, Phillippa suggested that it might have been helpful to tell her just how enormous it was before she opened the drawer, and very firmly confimed, once and for all, that it was a rat and not a mouse.  She was terribly brave and eventually did go back and get rid of it, which I was very impressed by.

So, back to the Mouse Saga of 2009, a dishwasher repair man finally dragged himself round to the house four days later, and promptly announced he would have to take the dishwasher away to assess the damage.  It took another five days for him to finish the crime scene examination.  It’ll cost several hundred dollars to fix, and the new parts won’t be available until mid June.  This all sounds pretty ridiculous to us, and I’ve always hated that dishwasher anyway, so Andrew has promptly gone and bought a new one (deferred payments and interest free for 15 months!  Hurrah for our easy credit). 

It arrives on Monday, so until then we’ll keep washing dishes like we did in the 1980′s, and in the meantime I might just throw a bit more poison about.  You can never be too sure with those pesky rodents.