I had the most bizarre convo with my mother last night and I am still struggling to wrap my head around this story. It started normally enough but then veered into a Surreal Soap Opera landscape from which we never returned. (1 of 20)

Mom: You remember how my new dishwasher kept breaking down and not working?
Me: Yeah, I mean I knew it had broken down once or twice but hadn't heard about it since.

Mom: So one of the times it stopped working the repair man came out and he told me that the reason my dishwasher had stopped working was these black circular disks were lodged in the DW, and that they had come off of my cutting boards.
Me: Sounds weird, but okay.

Mom: But my cutting boards didn't have black disks. I even showed them to him, and I didn't recognize the disks he was showing me. But he insisted they came off my cookware and caused the DW to stop working.

Mom: The day after this happened I was thinking about it and I concluded he had those black disks in his pocket all along, I had gone through my house and there were no black disks on anything. I even called my friend and told her I thought he had brought those with him.

Me: (wondering whether I should be concerned that my mother has forgotten where these mystery disks originated from) Okaaay.
Mom: So I told this guy I had a 5 year warranty and he seemed very unhappy about it. He told me that nobody buys the 5 year warranty.

Mom: He demanded to see the paperwork for it, & he stood there reading the entire thing. After reading it he told me the warranty wouldn't cover the damage caused by the black disks and I'd have to pay him for it anyway.
Me: Hmm! Suspicious.

Mom: So fine, I paid him. The DW worked for a bit but then stopped. I kept trying different things to fix it, pulling it out from the wall in case something in the back was getting pinched, etc. Finally I called out for a repair man and this guy comes out again.

Mom: This time he says that I need to replace the pump, so we get a new pump and he installs it. It worked maybe twice after that, then the next time I tried to run it, it started making this grinding noise that didn't sound good so I turned it off.
Me: Wow!

Mom: I call & they send out a new guy. He says the circuit boards are broken, they need to order new boards & wait a month for them to come. He installs them and: the DW still won't work.
Me: (listening in disbelief, wondering why my mom's DW has such a poor work ethic)

Mom: The repair guy calls his boss & his boss has him basically take the entire DW apart & put it back together, it takes him 3 hours but at the end of it all the DW works. Then he says to me, 'Sarah, I need you to sit down.'

Me: Oh my god, WHY? What does it even mean when a DW repair man asks you to sit down?! Did the DW achieve sentience and ask to be turned into scrap metal?!
Mom: So he says to me, Your dishwasher was sabotaged.
Me: WHAT

Mom: He says, the owner of [local chain where mom bought the DW] wants me to be honest with you & tell you the truth about what I found. The individual who installed your pump failed to connect it properly, and it was so poorly installed I believe it was done this way on purpose.

Me: The other DW repairman is your nemesis! Why have you never told me you have a nemesis who repairs appliances! Or, you know, breaks appliances if they're yours.
Mom: I asked him, why would he have sabotaged my dishwasher, how does that benefit him? He said he didn't know.

Mom: But he didn't believe it was an accident because it wasn't just 1 or 2 things that were wrong. It was multiple wires that were not connected & the micro switch was not set up.
Me: He is a DW saboteur working undercover as a DW repair man, does he even need a reason really?

Mom: He said this individual is not employed by us anymore. I asked him about the black disks. He said, I know what you're talking about, I have heard similar complaints from other customers. I can only offer my apologies and the company's apologies.

Mom: He gave me his personal number so that if the DW breaks again I can call him personally and he will prioritize coming out to fix it for me.
Me: The black disk subterfuge is REAL? How many people had he told this black disk lie to?!

Mom: I don't know, but more than one apparently. I said to him, how did my DW even work if the pump wasn't connected this whole time? He said he honestly didn't know how it worked at all after that. But it's been working fine since he fixed it, thank god.

So, this story has its amusing & surreal side but I guess the morale of the story for me is that since my dad passed my mom has dealt with a lot of sketchy repair places & shops that seem to think they can take advantage of or ignore her.

Ladies, if a repair man tells you black disks magically manifested in your DW and broke it (metaphorically OR literally), fight like hell. A tip of the cap to the business owner & DW repair guy whose honesty enabled this surreal story to come to light.