The dishwasher has attempted an illegal operation....

Last night, I did something I've never had to do before: I rebooted the dishwasher.

About 18 months ago, we bought a GE Triton dishwasher. Is verry nice; in a vast improvement over the old dishwasher, this one's quiet enough that you can talk on the phone while standing next to it when it's running.

Instead of having knobs and buttons that actually open and close electrical contacts (I can hear Scotty saying, "How quaint"), it has a set of momentary-contact touchpads. Just close the door, push the "Start" touchpad, and off it goes. An embedded microcontroller takes care of the rest.

I tried to start it last night, and it wouldn't. None of the LEDs for the options (like the pot scrubber cycle) would light, but it would beep like it's supposed to when the door closed, so I knew it was getting power. The most response I could get out of it was that every once in a while, the LED on the start button would flash momentarily.

I toyed with the idea of taking the door apart, to look for a loose connection, when I thought, if this were a PC, what would I do?

The answer was, of course, "reboot it". So I unplugged it, waited 5 seconds, then plugged it back in. Opened and closed the door, and it started right up.

There's a moral in here somewhere, but I'm not sure yet what it is.