Several months ago, I moved into a new condo. Shortly after, I noticed the arm in my condo’s dishwasher was loose. It seemed to chug along fine without. Then, a real hiccup, a few days ago: the dishwasher stopped 10 minutes into a cycle and displayed an error code. In searching for what the error code suggested, I quickly reached out for a technician.

When the technician came, he saw the loose arm and said he’d start with what he saw first. I was about to tell him the dishwasher worked fine with the loose arm the whole time, to troubleshoot the error code instead. But, he was the expert, so I said nothing.

After a few minutes of properly tightening the arm and setting it back up, he ran it. Over 40 minutes later, it was still going. It was clearly fine, and I was surprised that the fix was so simple. In my very brief search for the error code, I never saw that as a possible answer. When I told him about it, he laughed and reminded me that he did this every day. I really appreciated his expertise.

He left once he felt confident the dishwasher was all good, which it was, though he still checked in with me after to confirm.

I believe in practice, expertise, and people. This experience reminded me why.