Our Bleeping Dishwasher

My husband or I, usually my husband, starts the dishwasher every night after we eat dinner. The dishwasher goes on around 9 pm and finishes around 10:30 pm, long after we've gone to bed. And every night, when it finishes, it bleeps every 10 minutes until someone turns it off. It doesn't beep. It bleeps. When you are listening to it at 1am through the shared wall at your headboard, believe me, you can tell the difference.

There is a way to turn the notification bleep off. I found it one day when the mounting frustration led me to a google search at 2am. But then the power went out. And the bleeping started again. I couldn't find the webpage with the directions to turn it off. And then my brain power went out. Because no matter how hard I try I can't remember the way I pushed the buttons to get the damn bleeps to stop.

I am sure that with ample time and energy we could figure out how to get the bleeping dishwasher to stop. But neither Norm nor I have tried very hard. We just take turns waking up in the middle of night, usually from either a full bladder or a screaming baby, and follow the bleep through the dark hallways until sweet silence is restored.

It probably seems ridiculous that we don't take 20 minutes to figure out how to stop the bleep. It probably seems even more ridiculous that we haven't figured out that we could start the dishwasher earlier so that we are still awake when the cycle finishes. But we are parents of toddlers who are so accustomed to nocturnal disturbances that a few bleeps you can turn off with the push of a button hardly seems newsworthy. Maybe when our life settles down a little we will have enough time to debleep our dishwasher. But by then it will probably be time for a new one.