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February 18, 1998
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The washer broke. Those of you who follow this journal regularly know I don't mean my washer, I mean the washer at MRFRS where I am constantly in danger of being lost forever under a pile of dirty cat bedding. Sound the alarm! Battlestations! Battlestations! The sign in the laundry room gives a number to call in case of washer emergency, so Dawna did that and left a message with the answering service. The tension mounted. Desperate, she called the Maytag guy down the street - you know the lonely Maytag repairman who's glad for a call just to have somebody to talk to - anyway, there's this Maytag dealer right down the street and the guy came right over, replaced three parts, told us we overload the machine and that's why it broke, and didn't charge for the labor - only for the parts. He likes cats. With the washer out of commission, no matter how briefly, an enormous backlog of laundry has built up. You can't fit two people in the laundry room together. Dunno how the plumber would fit in there. For some reason, instead of intensifying my efforts to keep the laundry going, I start ignoring it. I am oblivious to the subtle sound of the dryer stopping. Of course the fact that Bob is drilling a hole in the food room door to install a new latch doesn't help. I can't hear myself think over the drill. Then the washer starts banging again - like it's going to explode any second. It's off balance again. I put in a very small load - but it has this huge blanket in there, which throws it all off. I take the blanket out, restart it, notice it still bangs, take more stuff out, til there's nothing left but a couple of towels. It hums happily. Dawna reloads the towels but not the blanket and starts it up again. It stops unbeknownst to me. Roberta notices it and panics because the it's stopped and the cycle isn't finished and she keeps pushing the knob in to restart it and nothing happens. I'm no help because I'm not really paying attention. Otherwise would have noticed she was pushing the knob in instead of pulling it out. The dryer knob pushes in, the washer knob pulls out. Dawna notices this before Roberta has a breakdown. The emergency washer guy calls, Dawna tells him what happened and asks about whether it's overload or simply off balance. He tells us we overload the capacity and we should only put in medium loads. He hangs up. Later, Bob asks the question that has been on all our minds - just how big is a medium load? Dawna places another call to washer emergency man to ask him to quantify small, medium, and large in pounds so we have some way of knowing what we're doing. Meanwhile, this new cat, a Persian who looks like a black and white mop, has matted hair and needs brushing. Eileen brushes him and comes up with enough cat hair to fabricate an entire litter of kittens. The cat still looks like a mop though. I can't tell which end is which unless it's looking directly at me. Pumpkin is being cute today. Mean but cute. She has staked out a pile of clean litterboxes next to the barrel of clean litter where she usually holds forth. She's nestled herself into the top litter box in the stack cozily and drapes one paw over the edge in that way that's guaranteed to make somebody adopt her if only they saw her this way instead of hissing at one and all from the top of the barrel. When the emergency washer guy called back, he told us the load capacity is 12 pounds. That isn't much laundry. | |
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