The washing machine waltz

There are times I really enjoy being a woman. Especially when it comes to no longer having the oomph I once was used to and being married, what's more, to a man who has triple the muscle power I have. So when it comes to moving a washing machine that is in a tricky place, of course I defer to the Department of Brawn.
However, this week even I had to wince when it came to the third time in as many weeks for the dratted thing. And let's be perfectly clear here - there has to be an evil little house gnome living in the corner where the machine goes, because this is also the third washing machine in five months.
Now granted the first was a Haier front loader that arrived with the bus, with a cracked/glued door and in a not-going condition. The learned advice from the mechanic was "Haier? Don't bother. Dump's the best place for it."
So on the basis of a)we live a fair way out of town and don't want to have to pay excess travel costs to use a repair man and b)we don't want to have to drag it out of place and take it into town ourselves, we bought a brand new Samsung front loader. Now, I am enamoured of their cellphone, wouldn't be without it and the portable office it gives me. So, I thought that given the work-horse abilities of the phone, surely that would mean the same would apply to the washing machine.

First off, we had to take the handrail off the entry steps into the bus so we could inch machine in. (I had measured the space it occupied, but not the door to get it INTO the bus...) It then had to be carefully levered up the stairs by Ken, before we discovered the toilet door had to come off so that we could slide it into place.  But, we got there. Even if I had to think seriously about whether I'd have to learn to knit to add some extra rows to Ken's jerseys. He ended up thinking his arms had been stretched a few extra inches.
Now, I have a fairly good IQ. Ok, a very good one. I am told it sits just inside the genius range, even. Except that for the life of me the dashboard on this thing looked like the interior cockpit of a spaceship. And I am not a rocket scientist. Be as that may, I managed to decipher how to put a load on; switched the thing on and sat back with a  thankful sigh that at long last, poor Mum no longer had to put up with my washing littering her floor anymore.
Wrong. With rolling r's even.
It got  just 10 seconds - yes, 10 whole seconds - into the cycle and *yawn*, sorry, no can do, no wanna know, not happening. It broke down. Irretrievably.
So, down came the toilet door, down came the handrail on the stairwell and Ken's arms got stretched a wee bit longer again. I'd had enough with that. Did not want another one and told Harvey Norman I wanted to get something else. Washing machines obviously are not Samsung's forte. (Neither are their laptops, as it turned out, but that is another story...)
So I went and handpicked a great looking Electrolux. You know those old vacuum cleaners that never gave up? Yep, that brand.
And for the first four months it worked really, really well.
But on our return from Aussie, we were told it wasn't spinning. So I pulled out the book on "How To's" and found myself head-on-the-floor, butt-in-the-air, eyeballing the floor orientated emergency water release and drainage pump, which, it informed me needs cleaning at least once a month. After pulling everything out, I was amazed. We must have had the cleanest dirty washing ever. It didn't need cleaning.
So I had to ring HN's again and somewhat tersely let the poor sales person whose fault all this wasn't, know that I wasn't happy at all at this turn of events. Which of course was when we discovered that living in the country does have at least one major drawback. The 'appointed appliance repairer' of Electrolux didn't make calls out here. To HN's staff members credit, he managed over a three day period, to get Electrolux to agree to using a repairer who is based out here.

I had to wince here, because in between times, I had bought a convection oven to replace the microwave oven. n being larger, it meant we could not access the power point to the washing machine easily. In fact, what had to happen was that the convection oven had to be pulled right out and the shelf it sits on slid out. :) Well I didn't think I'd have to pull the damned machine out again THAT soon! And Ken, who arms were still tweaking themselves back into shape from pulling it out to see if he could fix it, wasn't going to do it again.
So, poor Rob had to pull it out to find out what was wrong. It turned out that  the thingamajig that holds the belt on the watchamacallit that spins the drum had come off and in doing so, had flung the belt off.
Oh great - but easily fixable, yes? (And phew, not a stuck sock or bra, so the cost of repair was not ours!)
Er no,  said Rob. "I can put it back on for you, but by the looks of it, it'll only come off again. I might need to talk to the manufacturers to see if others have had the same problem and if they have upgraded a part for it. Because I don't think this part would do the job for any length of time." He was dead right about that. We got one load done, then halfway through another, I heard the telling 'Punk' as something came off at speed inside the machine cavity. And yes, the washing was dripping wet at the end of the cycle and no, the spinning action was not working once again.
Great news not.
By this time, I am not a happy little camper at all.
I am currently waiting to see what HN are going to come up with next. I certainly have no wish to take up one one kindly friends idea of getting Ken to "knock up a scrub board".My answer to that was, "Are you kidding?? Why would I give him such a dangerous idea? He'd want to keep it! He tried to get me to use an ancient wringer at the beach last year that he had found under a mate's house!" He still hasn't quite given up the idea off being totaly of the grid one day.
And no - this is NOT a picture of me!!