A Tale of Woe and Betrayal, Laundry Edition

Something glorious is happening in my house right now. I've been waiting two weeks for this, and it's finally happening. My clothes are getting washed!

About two weeks ago I pulled some clothes out of the dryer and found huge dirty oil spots all over them. I checked the clothes still in the washer, and they were even worse. Some kind of oil was leaking from my machine into the washtub. I suddenly had a dirtying machine instead of a washing machine.

This is just a small sample of the horrors.

At the time, I was pretty freaked out about two loads of MY clothes getting ruined. I'm still not happy about that but the last two weeks have given me a little perspective. I wasn't worried about the washer because I knew I could just call a repairman and get it fixed, because that's what adults do. No problem. I have a phone and a check book.

But after waiting two days for the repairman to show up, he took approximately 45 seconds to look in my machine and tell me it was toast. The transmission was shot or something.  I didn't even know washing machines have a transmission, but you learn something new every day. Sometimes what you learn is boring. That's another aspect of being an adult.

So later that same day the hubster and I took our brood of frisky children to a local appliance place that sells scratch-and-dent machines. We love this store because we get much nicer appliances for less money as long as we're willing to have a ding on the front. I proudly show off the ding on the front of my stainless-steel-french-door-freezer-on-the-bottom refrigerator, because it not only saved us $500, but it also saved us the trouble of worrying about our kids putting a ding in the door of an expensive new fridge. If I don't feel like looking at the dent I cover it with a magnet.

As our children roamed the store, racing up and down the aisles and pushing buttons on appliances, Kit and I carefully picked out a new washer using our tried-and-true technique: looking for the cheapest one. That day it happened to be a nice new front-loading high-efficiency washer, because the store was running an Earth Day special. Yay, us! We put the washer into the back of the van and took it home like hunters returning from a successful hunt, full of pride.

We dragged the old washer up out of the basement and to the curb, and put the new washer in the garage to wait for a better time to wrangle it, since it was already past the kids' bedtime. The next day the kids and I went to the garage to visit it, and I couldn't help but caress it a little. It was so beautiful, so clean, so efficient. "We're going to make beautiful laundry together," I murmured to it.
But all along, the new washer was hiding a dark secret.

Kit and some friends got the machine down into the basement and the next day before he went to work we leveled it and removed the bolts that keep the tub in place during transport. We couldn't get the last rubber spacer out right then, so while Kit was gone I spent a couple of hours wiggling it and yanking it and levering it and finally I got it out. I held it high in the air triumphantly, like Gollum and the One Ring. And just like Gollum, I immediately plunged into a pit of fiery torment, because after I hooked everything up the MACHINE WAS BROKEN. It just constantly filled with water, even unplugged. The whole time I was caressing that machine it was quietly snickering to itself.

Several phone calls and one week later, just as the laundry piles were starting to need signs warning travelers of the avalanche danger, I finally have a washer that works! It needed a new valve or something that had to be ordered. And now that washer really is beautiful. I just wish it hadn't required so much adulting to get clean clothes.

Maybe we don't need the TV anymore??