August 31st, 2020

So, the obvious question here is why are our clothes hanging in the living room?  It's because the dang dryer quit working.  ARGH!

The weekend before last, on Saturday, (I don't remember why) I threw in a load of towels.  It is unusual for me to bother to do laundry on weekends because...it's the weekend.  The weekends for us are now all about fun and exploring and occasional errands, not housey chores!  But that weekend, I did that load of towels.  They washed up just fine and they dried perfectly normally.  No mysterious sounds or alarms or warning bells. No shimmying, no jostling or shuddering.  Just wet towels in, perfectly dry fluffy towels out.

And then on the following Monday morning, as per usual, I began my loads of clothes, delicates first.  I don't know why, but that is the way I always do it.  When the washer was done, as always, I took everything out of the washer and transferred them to the dryer, closed the door, pushed the necessary buttons and...........nothing.  Well not nothing.  The lights came on, the display read out said "delicate dry" but the basket didn't turn. Hmmmm.  So I turned it off and the machine made a terrible clatter bang noise.  Ok that's new.

Experimentally, I turned it back on again.  The same thing happened right down to the clatterbang noise at the end. Crap.    I made a note of the model number and looked it up on line to see if there was some magic I could do to turn this frown upside down but nope.  With the symptoms I was noticing the only thing it said was to notify your appliance repair person.  Double dang.

Instead I notified Tim.  He did the same things that I did except instead of ending by swearing colourfully, he diagnosed the problem.  "Sounds like a belt slipped off"  he predicted, "Call Jessups.  It's still under warranty".  

Jessups is where we bought all of our household appliances.  They had a great selection and they were very nice and it's local.  I had no idea that it was still under warranty and that made  me feel a lot better about making the call.  When it comes to appliance repair (I have learned the hard way) often it's about the same cost to repair as it is to buy new.  Which frankly is a damned shame.

Anyway, so I called the nice people at Jessups (which is how it works here when something is still under warranty).  They listened to my sad story, looked us up in their computer, confirmed that it was all still under warranty and said that he would notify the repair person who would call us within 48 hours.  Ok.  Well, I'm certainly not leaving my wet clothes in the dryer for 48 hours!  So I draped everything around the house willy nilly.  By the dinner time it was all dry.  Some of it was set aside for later ironing. The rest was put away.

And I wait 48 hours.  When waiting for that return phone call, every hour passes like 24 hours.  A day feels like a week.  And there I am trapped in the house, afraid to leave for fear that I would miss the call.  What happens if I miss the call?  Do they call back?  Do I get put on a "bad" list?  Do I go to the end of the line?  

48 hours passed with no call.  I called Jessups back and well I didn't exactly rat out the appliance repair person, it was more that I asked to confirm our phone number since I hadn't heard back and therefore assumed that, maybe, they had the wrong number in their files (sneaky eh?)  No, the number was correct.  I gave them ALL of our numbers.  Both of our cell phones and the home phone. I made it clear that we really wanted to get this call.

And to be fair, before the end of the day the call came in.  The repair person called Tim's cell.  Tim described the problem, gave them his thoughts on what was wrong and the model number.  The repair person agreed with Tim's ideas but said that parts would have to be ordered and it would take about a week for them to come in.

Wow. I was deflated.  A week?  By this time it was already late Wednesday and the laundry was starting to pile up.  There was no way around it, I was going to have to go to the Laundromat.  Dang.  I hate going to the laundromat.

I went back out to our utility room (where my washer/dryer live) to assess the situation.  I made the executive decision to just go ahead and wash all of the clothes and only take towels and sheets to the laundromat.  That will cut down on cost and time and number of baskets.

Thursday, bright and early, I began doing the clothes.  It was Tim's idea to bring my hanging rack into the house instead of leaving it in the utility room. You see, the utility room has no air conditioning and no fan.  It stays relatively cool because it's concrete block and has no windows and is on the north side of the house.  But it is no ideal for drying clothes.  You need some air circulation for that. Which means in the actual house.

Sooooo, I washed the clothes and then hung up each piece to dry in the living room. Sigh.  Socks on a hangar, underwear on hangars, shirts, PJ's and shorts on hangars.  It was not a perfect plan but it works.  Even the heaviest pieces dried over night.  It meant a lot more ironing than usual. But the important part is that it worked!

On Friday morning, bright and early, I raided my change jar for quarters and loaded with baskets of towels and sheets and a zippy bag of Tide pods and dryer sheets, properly masked, off I went.  Fortunately there is one laundromat on the island and it is kept very clean and tidy.  when I arrived it was completely empty.  By the time I left it was packed.  

So here we are, one week later and well I haven't yet heard if the part has come in.  And once it does we then have to get on the repair person's schedule.  They will then have to show up and hopefully, fix the dryer before we can get back into my old laundry day groove.  I figger another week at least.  And it does not make me happy to say that.   But it is realistic.

So today I will wash clothes again and hang everything on hangars on the rack in the living room and perhaps Wednesday I will head back to the laundromat to do towels and sheets. And with any luck at all that will be the end of that.

I had enough of regular weekly laundromat visits during college and when the kids were babies and we still lived in an apartment.  Then there was a rerun when the kids and I were on our own in another apartment years later.  I've done my time.

Please send positive repair type thoughts.  Thankee