A while back, I washed a book in a load of laundry. It got all the way through the dryer before I realized what all this white stuff was. Ooops!
I’ve been feeling bad for all the fuzz left in the dryer. Poor dryer. Maybe I can take its front off and scoop all that fuzz and bits of pages out.
When I open the dryer door, I see some screws. Maybe if I take those out, the front will come off and I can clean out the fuzz?
No such luck. I do a quick search and find a video about GE dryers, and it points me to another screw that I can reach, under the lip of the dryer top.
I take those out too, most of the way. No luck, I’m going to have to take the top off the dryer too.
For the next hour, slow progress. My husband heard the dryer scraping on the floor and came down to help. He found the socket driver, and he looked up the correct video for our dryer.
The video said to unhook the wires. We did not.
We didn’t take the top off completely, just loosened it and angled it so we could get to the crucial screws holding the front.
In about an hour, we did get the front off, we did take out some fuzz. It was not fast or pretty, and I never got the kind of access I imagined. I imagined peeling off big sheets of gray lint; instead, I slithered my hand into a hole and scraped off what I could touch.
It was like changing code without understanding how the program works.
I want to change what this button does. Find some code that might matter, no, that didn’t change it. Consult ChatGPT, it gives me something close, but that doesn’t work either. I’m gonna have to pass more information in from the calling functions, so go look for those. Maybe this data is close enough. Yeah, OK. Now what changes did I make that didn’t work? Take those out one by one, it’s OK to drop a screw on the floor but please don’t drop the screw into the dryer. All right, it’s working now, not exactly what I wanted but close enough.
We got the dryer back together, plugged it in, opened the door to see that the light worked, turned the knob, and hit start. Nothing happened. 😭 We opened part of it, put it back, tried again. The answer was: push harder. We have to push the start button harder than before, but it works. 😅
Overall, my experience was positive. Did a physical thing, with some good teamwork, and nobody got hurt. I feel that I’ve done what I can for the dryer in recompense for abusing it. Yet–cannot recommend!
It took much longer than I thought to halfway do a thing, and I’m lucky we didn’t break it. Like editing code in production without version control, we put the dryer out of operation for an unknown duration.
Coding is way more satisfying when I have a decent understanding of why my change should work. When it doesn’t, I get frustrated, then learn something, then feel smart. It beats wiggling the front of the dryer back on and crossing our fingers and pushing the button harder.