Wednesday, June 14, 2006

#138 - When Sorting Laundry is Actually Fun

One rarely gets to see his family get this excited about laundry. Come to think of it, one rarely gets to feel this excited about laundry.

I blame our dryer.

The appliance repair guy visited our house again today. I must state, for the record, that this is not the same twit who darkened our laundry room two weeks ago. No, that turkey came, diagnosed a faulty door switch, said it would take about a week to order, then promptly went his way and completely failed to mention anything about our needing a new door switch to anyone who could do something about it. He was about as efficient an airhead as I ever hope to meet.

Mrs. Woody, after seeing me vent my spleen about park managers who failed for the umpteenth consecutive weekend to open the laundry room so I could feed their stinkin' dryer its steady diet of quarters in return for, oh, about 1/3 the load our dryer normally handles, decided (Mrs. Woody, that is, in case you've forgotten) to call Maytag and find out where, oh, where our missing repair person had gone.

That's when she found out that, according to that repair person, our dryer was perfectly fine. Only it really wasn't, Mrs. Woody pointed out. She'd just sent her husband back to the Dryer From the Vending Machine Inferno because he'd just confirmed that our dryer really was still dead.

Fortunately, the Maytag lady who handled the call was very gracious. She admitted that it was entirely the repair person's fault that we were still without a functioning dryer and promised to reprocess our order. No guarantees about timing, of course, which meant waiting yet another week, but we were, by now, quite desperate. Mrs. Woody also insisted, it goes without saying, that a different repair person make the visit. To this, also, the Maytag Lady assented.

So, today, right on schedule (although this, of itself, isn't special -- the twit was also right on time) our different repair person appeared. 15 minutes later we had a functioning dryer. We also found out (I would have written this into a script for any given sit-com) that it was, according to the repair person, the easiest part on the dryer to replace. "Open the door, two screws, and you've got it," he said. Of course. Silly me. At least it was covered by our extended warranty.

You may imagine that both the washer and our newly revitalized dryer have been pressed into indentured servitude since about 5 minutes after the repair person left the house. We're on load number 4 in the dryer, and number 5 is churning in the washer. We have probably another 2 to go before we're caught up. I have already folded more laundry today than I have in nearly a year.

Mrs. Woody, for her part, normally does the folding, but she's hip-deep in plans for our daughter's 9th Birthday Celebration, which involves a Harry Potter-Themed Sleepover for Five Little Girls. She's taking this extremely well, which probably means I'd better go check my Xanax prescription and see if it's lighter than I remember it from the other day. Of course, since I get to "assist" with decorating, herding, shopping, and doing voice-over work for the Sorting Hat, maybe I should hit the bottle instead.

Aw, who'm I kidding? Your daughter doesn't turn 9 every day, and she's having the time of her young life. I'll probably enjoy every minute of it, so long as my back holds out.

In the meantime, gotta run. Got laundry to fold, transfer, and wash. Gotta put more card stock in the printer. Busy, busy, busy.

Enjoying the "simple pleasures," as Mrs. Woody put it.

No comments: