AI totally failed on this one: just because one guy ruined a turkey baster shlurping up the caustic goop at the bottom of his dishwasher doesn’t meant that that’s the way to do it. Spare me the robot-think. I scrolled on.

I lifted the silver cap on the side of the sink: yes water went through it but only barely; I put the cap back. I pulled out the filter at the bottom of the Bosch and sprayed it clean. Looked okay–oh wait. There’s a long hair caught at the bottom.

Now whose would that be, says the guy with the migraine, glad to be able to hand over the problem of the day.

I gave it a few twists to prove it twists and having by now gotten the water out of the bottom of the machine as much as possible, consulted the instructions again. They said something about some white cap and honey ain’t no white cap no way no how that I can see. I put the filter back in, took the soap square out just in case I’d have to do this all over again, and turned the machine on.

It ran great for about five minutes. Then it gave the error message we’d woken up to yesterday.

Back to the instructions.

No I am NOT going to pull the dishwasher out, and neither was his back going to, but I did look under the sink. Hose looks old but fine. I gave it a little tug, as if that would tell me anything.

I scooped the water out again with a metal measuring cup (a whole lot easier to clean than the rubber inside of a turkey baster), got the last of it out with paper towels again, and took the gray filter out again. (I found out there was still a bit of dishwasher water down in there when my hair landed in it. Great. I mean, what’s it going to do, bleach it?)

Back to the instructions. They were full of jargon they assumed everybody knew and I was like, Magnetic resistance? On plastic parts? What?

Wait. Are they saying over here that that filter comes apart? We’ve had this machine how many years and I never saw that? It does? It does!

And there.

There at the hidden bottom of that inner part.

Was a second and totally tangled single hair that had twirled and twirled and wrapped around a small piece of fat. The meltings from a cheese sandwich maybe?

I worked it out of there and was certain it couldn’t be that simple. I clicked the two filter parts back together (make sure it clicks! they said) and back into the machine and hit Express Wash to test it for an hour.

It. Worked.

I pulled the filter back out and scrubbed it down again after taking the photo and thus seeing bits of crud that had reappeared in that one spot, thank you blog.

I loaded today’s dishes I hadn’t done by hand yet, put the soap back in, let the machine cool down for as long as I could stand it and then set it to actually wash this time.

It finished its 168 minute cycle as I was typing this and everything is gloriously clean.

Just in case you ever wanted to save yourself the $238 Bosch dishwasher repair job I paid for last time. The online instructions were kind of terrible, but the relief at success is giddying.

(Postscript: I just found how-to videos from Bosch, here. For next time.)