Everybody's crazy but me...

...and if that doesn't make you stop and think, nothing will.

My washing machine broke down today. The Nice Kid leaves at 5 a.m. Tuesday morning for six days in Orlando with the school choir. The Big Boy leaves Wednesday for a week in Louisiana on business. It's two days after Thanksgiving and there are dirty clothes EVERYWHERE. And my washing machine copped an attitude.

Once upon a time, when I was a single parent, I had this leftover washing machine. When I was in high school my grandmother had a washeteria. (Took us three months to figure out how to spell that. Turns out? It's negotiable.) When she closed the business down, my dad put the industrial machines in the barn. When I needed a washing machine, he took the cover off the coin return, hauled the washer to my house and I hooked it up. Whenever you washed a load of clothes, you picked up the quarter from the bottom of the coin return, dropped it into the slot, pushed the money holder and and presto! Washed your clothes.

Life should be so simple.

The washer and dryer I have today? Talk to you. Remind you to change the lint filter. Adjust to the weight of the load. Handle 16 pairs of jeans at once, or wash your grandmother's linen tablecloth easier than your hands can. So when I started getting an F/02 error message today? Great. Just great. Reset. Reprogrammed. Eventually reached the unplugging stage. Can't get it going and we can't live without it so...I emailed Sears. Repair.

Do you KNOW what they want me to do?

Pay them THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY dollars a year, for a service contract. PEOPLE!!! I can buy a new one every three years for that! And like I told the nice little salesgirl, when I bought the machine and she offered me an extended warranty..."I'm not buying a machine I have to pay YOU to run. The reason I bought this machine? I'm trusting you."

Dumbass.

So Thursday...that would be three full days from now...someone is coming to fix my machine. That means that sometime tonight I'm going to have to pare down the washing to manageable levels and then...take it to my mother-in-law, I guess. MY mother sure as hell ain't washing nobody else's laundry. I'm trying to trick the machine into resetting itself. I keep programming in funky cycles, just in case it got all comfortable with "Normal." Or some such shit.

Right now? I just want these piles of clothes OUT of my kitchen. OUT, OUT, damn spot. And streak, and stain and drip.

I was going to stop drinking, except for Friday and Saturday, so that I didn't have to worry about an extra ten pounds creeping up in the next four weeks. Fuck that shit...I'll stop eating, instead.

Comments

Unknown said…
Dory's iPhone did the same thing and they wanted the cost of another one to fix it. She unloaded on this woman like they had taken her firstborn! At one point there was the "I'm so angry, I don't have any words!! I can't even speak!!"
I was never so proud!
Country Girl said…
As I've pointed out before...WE'RE THE CUSTOMER!!!! We have the money!!! Why are we at the bottom of the pile? (As in the royal "we" understood. ;)