littledev

Forgive me, I need a rant. My fury with Miele knows no bounds, and has consumed (parts of) the past two years of my life. We went all-in with Miele because of their marketing around long-lasting products, purchasing a dishwasher and a (hella expensive) multi-fuel (gas/electric) range and oven. The dishwasher is a generally solid product, however, after a few years of heavy use — we work from home and cook a ton — it's making gradually-loudening grinding noises. The range has been a garbage fire since day one, with a cascade of problems.

I'm sitting on $8k worth of rather new appliances that I am unable to repair in any fashion. When we bought them from a local appliance store — we live in a rural New England state — they were Miele-certified. Then they outsourced that certification to a local appliance-repair technician. Then Miele revoked the certification, or otherwise is no longer providing it, to that appliance-repair technician.

My appliances are broken. I call the place I bought it: they punt me to their repair technician. That repair technician is outright hostile and hates Miele and says they never call him back and he's not certified anymore. I call Miele. They punt me to "regional dispatch," which then ends up punting me behind the scenes back to the place I bought the appliances from, which doesn't ever call me back. I keep trying to push further, but all I get from Miele is that there are no certified technicians within X miles of me. This cycle has repeated 8 or 10 times.

The part I believe we need to fix the dishwasher is >$500 non-wholesale, so that is too expensive of a risk to take if it's not what will fix it. No non-certified appliance repair techs in the area (thin on the ground in general) will touch Miele products.

So I am literally waiting for them to stop working and then I guess I'll throw them away?

One of these days I'll generate the gumption to, I dunno, send a letter to Miele HQ or something?

So desperately screwed as a consumer here.

The Zendure Passport III worldwide travel adapters changed my reality in 2022 (~$70). It sounds boring, but man. I've had many worldwide plug adapters in my day, and many chargers. But the Zendure has a 65W USB-C fast charger in it, plus 3 more USB-C and a single USB-A. When I travel (and that includes "traveling to the coworking place"), I used to bring:

* A plug adapter

* My big ol' laptop charger brick and cord

* A medium-sized USB-A charger for phone, headphones, power bank

* A USB-C charger for iPad, Kindle

* A small power strip because I had to plug several things in

Now I just bring the single Passport III adapter. Done. It has a single power outlet pass-through, but I haven't even needed it because the only thing I ever plug in is chargers.

Reminds me of the time the company that owns BlackBerry decided to post some listings on the new-at-the-time .jobs TLD...