Thursday, May 25, 2006

Washing My Time Away

One of the advantages of living with the McQueens, as opposed to living in some apartment somewhere, was the laundry situation. They have a washer and dryer in the house. I didn't have to seek out a laundromat.

However, in the move to Ottawa the dryer was no longer in ideal working order. Each load had to be put through the dryer twice. It seemed one of the heaters wasn't working. Doing double the work would cost an arm and a leg in electricity, it also added an extra 45 minutes to an hour for a load of laundry. But we lived with it.

When I returned to Ottawa for the following Summer semester the dryer still hadn't been fixed. Not only that, but the motor in the washer had died. The agitator wasn't turning.

So, there I was, for the first couple of weeks of the summer, washing my clothes by hand in the bath tub, then putting them in the dryer for two cycles to do a laundry. Laundry had gone from being something to be done in an hour and a half as a background process to being a half-a-day affair.

Eventually we had a repair-man over to look at the washer. I don't know what he did, whether he replaced the motor or not.

Washer fixed.

Then we had him look at the dryer, expecting a big repair job. He turns the knob pointing at "Delicate" and "Normal" and finds there's no resistance. So he takes the knob off and sees that the knob isn't actually turning the switch. The switch had somehow got stuck on "Delicate". He switched it back to "Normal" with his plyers, and put the knob back on.

Dryer fixed.

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