"What I want to say is that, god forbid, had something happened where our son was injured, I can insure that there would have been a lawsuit due to either the faultiness of the dishwasher or the installation, yet these customer service reps behaved as though that meant NOTHING to them."
I work in retail and as a store manager I have to deal with all complaints. While I may sympathize with a complaint it may not always come across because of what I'm saying. What I mean is they may have been sympathetic to your problem but unable to do anything more than they already had. I would follow the suggestions of some of my fellow posters and unplug the machine, wait for service, and if you still feel strongly about it don't buy anything else from Sears and tell your friends about this. That is the way you get a companies attention, bad word of mouth not threats of a lawsuit.