The SL15N1B Classixx, the Problem-Solving Habit, and How I Changed My Life
The Robert Bosch Hausgeräte GmbH SL15N1B Classixx is a dishwasher. It is the dishwasher in the apartment I am currently living in, which in northwest (NW) London, and is the residence of one of my best friends from high school, Tim. I am a guest here. As of this writing, Tim has been in Montreal for almost a month, generously leaving me his home while I train for a new career.
That career is being a front-end web developer, for which I’m taking intensive courses at Toronto-based Juno College, ‘live online’, which means I spend 7.5 hours a day in a Zoom call, with ~30 other people, on Eastern time. I’m one week into the ‘bootcamp’, but I also just finished two 2-week intro courses (web develop (HTML/CSS) and JavaScript), so I’ve been doing this full-time for the last five weeks.
Since Tim left four weeks ago, I’ve also: discolored his kneeling chair by trying to clean a tiny pasta stain with dish detergent; inadvertently created tiny circular stains on his living room wall with problematically oleaginous “white” Blu Tack; and a lamp that was turn-on-able now seems slightly less turn-on-able. By my standards — by any standards, really — this is a massive path of destruction.
And then, two weeks ago, I opened Tim’s Robert Bosch Hausgeräte GmbH SL15N1B Classixx dishwasher to find all my dishes covered in rice and grease and goo.
So, the thing is, although I’m basically responsible and would have eventually set to work on solving this problem, I know that, two months ago, I would have freaked out, gotten anxious, and avoided dealing with this problem, maybe until the day before Tim got back. And so I almost couldn’t believe my own frame of mind as, on a 1-hour lunch break from a JavaScript class, which for me was between 6 and 7pm, Greenwich Mean Time, I looked now on this truly disgusting mess inside this Robert Bosch appliance. Calmly, focused, without anxiety, I immediately calmly crouched down and started methodically investigating the inner workings of the SL15N1B Classixx.
I won’t bore you with the details of the troubleshooting, but eventually I figured out that the filter was cleverly interlocked with the drainage system, so that if the filter wasn’t completely screwed into place, a mechanism that let the water drain out wouldn’t engage, thus preventing unfiltered rice sludge from clogging the plumbing.
Of course this is how the SL15N1B worked — how else could it work?
And so I reflected that every machine made my humans has been designed, and that design is, in principle, learnable.
And all it takes is the mindset to achieve this.
However, I want to point one thing out. In my title I used the word “habit” for a reason. This is because I think my reaction to the clogged dishwasher I’ve described here is not so much a skill as a practice.
See, the funny thing is, I actually have coding experience. As a kid I made basic HTML websites, and in university I learned C and R, and I’ve picked up a bit of Python on my own. And so, although it’s obvious to me that my being steeped in coding is the cause of my calm methodical reaction, I don’t think it had anything to do with the actual SKILL of how to, say, make a button ‘listen’ for a mouse click.
Like meditation, or self-care, problem-solving is a habit; a practice. And it feels good. It makes you feel competent, capable, relaxed, even powerful. There’s that saying that life is not about what happens to you, but about how you react to what happens to you. But simply reading that sentence will not change your life. Coding — not to, uh, get all bombastic about it, but, well — will.
