My dad always said "if you break your tools, you'll have to replace them at your own expense," so I took care of things pretty well, never even thought of deliberately overloading a washer or doing other "destructive testing experiments" with household equipment.
Though, once, whilst too young to know better, I used a new Hoover upright to pick up something that was slightly damp, with the result that green fuzz must have grown in the machine, because it emanated a nasty smell for a couple of weeks.
However, there is a dishwasher story...
About 10 years ago I was renting a house that had a dishwasher. A close friend moved in with me. (Yeah, you know where this is going...!) He loaded up the dishwasher and turned it on, and I walked into the kitchen just in time to see thick suds oozing from the front of the machine and spreading across the floor like something from a 1950s The Blob From Outer Space movie. I asked him what he'd done. He said he just put some of this dish detergent here -as he held up a bottle of dish liquid- and turned it on. I asked how much. He said, oh enough to fill the dispenser!
I said, "I get the impression you don't have mechanical aptitude..." which I quickly regretted and had conscience-bugs about for a year or so. In any case, with much effort, the suds-monster was eventually tamed and cleaned up, and then I showed him how to use the machine properly.
A couple of years ago I had two roommates. One is an engineering genius and still a close friend. The other was, frankly, a freeloading leach. One day he (the freeloading leach) put his wet sneakers in the dryer, with nothing else in it. I told him I didn't want him to do that because it could harm the dryer, which already had developed an intermittent squeaking sound as it rotated. He gave me a ration of verbal you-know-what, and I decided I didn't want to escalate the conflict so I left it there.
Sure enough, the dryer stopped heating up after that. I told him I was going to bill him for the repair, and he gave me another ration of verbal you-know-what, so I let that one go also.
New rule in the house, as per Colin Powell's foreign policy: You break it, you've bought it. And, unlike George Bush's foreign policy, if you can't afford to fix it, you don't get the opportunity to break it.
Now that I think of it, this gives me an idea. Next year I plan to buy a house, and install a graywater recycling system I've designed, to use shower and laundry wastewater for flushing the toilet. However, the system in the guest bathroom needs to be idiot-proofed. Hence, an overhead graywater tank to feed the toilet tank. I'll just fill the overhead tank before visitors come over, so they don't get the chance to screw up the pumps!
