In the wash

Hear our voices, we entreat

I moved to Dunedin in 2008. It was a busy time. My wife and I had just bought our house on the hill, and we were expecting our first child.

Apart from sleepless nights, my overarching memory of that period is standing outside businesses asking workers who were made redundant if they wanted to talk.

That included workers at Fisher & Paykel, after it was announced it would close its Mosgiel factory with the loss of 430 jobs.

In addition to the loss of jobs, it was another blow to the city’s connection with the company, after it acquired oven manufacturer H.E. Shacklock in 1955.

I’m reminded of this closure because 2023 has a very 2008 feel. We are in a downturn, and businesses are trimming costs in order to survive.

It is also an election year, and you’ll remember that 2008 ended with John Key becoming Prime Minister.

So it is time for a quick poll. I don’t care who you support, but I am interested in who you think will win.

Anyway, enough of politics, back to Fisher & Paykel.

When I moved into our house on 2008, the previous owner had left their Fisher & Paykel washing machine, and so we sold our surplus machine (another brand from memory) via TradeMe.

That machine has soldiered on, washing the cotton nappies of two children to their mud-stained sporting gear.

I get all misty-eyed thinking about it, largely because I’m in charge of washing at home.

But I love that machine, especially when I’m desperate for the last cycle to finish and it seems to take an eternity to end, and resembling the sound of a Boeing 747 preparing for takeoff.

Did I mention I loved that machine?

It was during the 2020 Covid lockdown that I discovered my machine held a deep, dark secret and by God I exploited it.

Turns out Fisher & Paykel washing machines dating back to the early 1990s, could play the New Zealand national anthem. As an aside, God defend New Zealand was originally a poem penned by Dunedin journalist Thomas Bracken, and published in 1876, but the tune was by John Joseph Woods, of Lawrence.

It is nice that we still sing the words that Bracken penned, now usually in Te Reo and then in English. I’ll be doing that this Sunday when the Football Ferns take on Switzerland at Dunedin Stadium.

It is also nice that Bracken’s name lives on with the Bracken’e View, one of the nicest spots to look over Dunedin (or where you also order your kids to run up the hundreds of steps to tire them out). It is possibly lost on the hundreds of first-year students who drink at the spot on St Patrick’s Day. A nice touch.

Anyway, I digress.

I put a few questions to Fisher & Paykel about how the national anthem playing machines originated.

Neil Cheyne, reliability and compliance general manager, said the national anthem playing machines coincided with “the emergence of our SmartDrive technology”.

“The SmartDrive programmes which powered the motor were coded onto non-rewritable chips, with limited storage.”

This is where it gets interesting. One of the engineers involved in the SmartDrive project noticed that the software didn’t quite fill the capacity of the chip.

So what did this unnamed Kiwi legend do?

Well, that unnamed engineer decided to surprise their team by programming in a popular movie theme song into the code, Cheyne said.

But this unnamed theme (gah!) remains buried deep within the software, “dormant and inaccessible to the user”.

I’ve had a think about this, what do you think the movie theme could be?

I was picking Jaws, but then I came across a 2013 Stuff story, which said:

The washing machines could also play two theme songs from 1980s science fiction movies if there was a power surge.

So Jaws is dead in the water. That leaves Star Wars as an almost certain lock, but what is the other?

Close Encounters? No, that close encounter was in 1977. Star Trek? The franchise had a few 80s movies that boldly went into the movies. Ghostbusters? Well, who else are you going to call on this topic?

Anyway a few years after this unnamed Easter egg, or perhaps “eggs”, were buried deep within the software, Fisher and Paykel were looking for ways for customers to interact with machines on display in retail stores.

This was ingenious, because apart from opening the lid of the washing machine in question (while focused only on the price) I can’t see of any other way of interacting with a washing machine on display in a retail store.

I digress. It led to the team revisiting the idea behind that Easter egg, Cheyne said.

That led to the national anthems of Fisher & Paykel’s home markets of New Zealand and Australia being selected “in recognition of the company’s history and legacy, along with America’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’”.

So there you have it. And if you wanting to play one of those anthems then try the following.

How to play the New Zealand anthem:

• Hold down “power” and the “advance” buttons together to turn on demonstration mode.

• Then hold “wash temp up” for 2 seconds.

How to play the Australian anthem, Advance Australia Fair:

• Press “wash level up” for 2 seconds until it beeps, then press “temperature up” button for 2 seconds.

Lastly, for the American anthem, Star Spangled Banner:

• Press “wash level up” for 2 seconds until it beeps, repeat pressing “wash level up” for 2 seconds until it beeps, then press “temperature up” button for 2 seconds.

To finish, Cheyne left me with this:

“To this day, however, buried deep within the code of the earliest Fisher & Paykel SmartDrive washing machines remains one of cinema’s most recognisable theme tunes, heard by only a small number of Fisher & Paykel engineers.”

I’ve heard that some machines for the North American market can play Crazy Frog by Axel F, but this seems too cruel.

If you know of anyone who may know the answer, please send me an email at hamish.mcneilly@stuff.co.nz. I’d love to know.

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ICYMI a couple of stories I enjoyed from the last week including the story about a building inside the building (The Leviathan). You can read that here.

And I also wrote about the heroic rescue by Kalya Kandegoda Gamage, who saved his then 11-year-old brother Kithmi.

Last week’s story about Anna Hill, who hasn’t eaten a proper meal in two years, had a nice ending. Readers helped her raise $30k, which will enable Anna to fly to Delhi and get the life-saving operation she needs. Great stuff.

This weekend I had the pleasure of watching two World Cup matches, and enjoyed the experience, as I did taking my boys to checkout the fanzone at the Town Hall.

Here are a couple of observations:

• It took ten minutes from my house to find a park, a few hundred metres from te stadium

• It took 90 seconds to get through security/bag search and ticket check and into the stand, and then 30 seconds to find our seats.

• The atmosphere was great, no drunk munters yelling “F*** you, you c****” like I heard at the last All Black test match.

• If the Dunedin Stadium is loud with 13,000 people, get ready for Sunday when it is sold-out.

If you want something other than football to watch, check out this video of Air Jaws filmed in Foveaux Strait, courtesy of Discovery UK.

I’ve been meaning to return to the island for years, but I don’t think I would go swimming there anytime soon.

If you want some music to listen to, try heading to the Fan Festival on Friday to catch Ladyhawke, Ladi6 (video below) on Saturday, and then the Topp Twins on Sunday.

Great stuff, for more information including times please check this page out.

If you know where the below was taken, please let me know in the comments.

Lastly, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge my late colleague, Jo McKenzie-McLean, she will be missed.