Alice and the Great Laundry DebacleShaw

I have had no washing machine for two weeks. Allow me to explain the severity of this statement. In London, most people have front-loading washing machines under the counters in their kitchens. It might seem odd to prepare food and wash your undies in the same room, but if you think about it, it seems to make as much sense as say, putting the washer in the bathroom. These are all, more or less, sanitary places where you clean stuff (in theory).

Two weeks ago, right around the time I got back from Greece, ours stopped moving past the rinse cycle. I put my towels and sheets in one morning at 8 am, came home at 8 pm, and there were my pillow cases still whirring around in the little window, being incessantly sloshed with water. When I finally managed to extract them from the machine about two hours and another whole cycle later, they were sopping wet and somewhat questionable smelling for having been lost at sea for 14 hours.

This situation is especially disconcerting when you know that in London, it’s an anomaly to have a clothes dryer. Generally, life carries on here with your tank tops as stiff as a board and your sheets taking three days to dry on a clothes horse. I mean, okay, fine. I get the space issue that the fact that dryers need to be ventilated somehow in these old buildings and the fact that they are just a HUGE energy vacuum (even more than the actual vacuum). I understand all that. Still, it’s a sad concept for those of us accustomed to our soft cotton shirts, fluffy towels and the creepy high-pitched voice of the Snuggle teddy bear.

So with no dryer, you start to do some serious forward-planning when it comes to laundry. It’s rare to do more than one load at a time, because there’s simply no room on the clothes horse. Long story short, I had a lot of laundry to do even before the damn thing broke.

Compounding the issue is that I NEVER iron. Or at least I didn’t in the States. I’m not even totally sure how to do it (this from the girl whose mother irons t-shirts)…so much so that the other day, I went to do it and didn’t realize until about 10 minutes in that it wasn’t on. I just assumed that I was doing it wrong. I have no idea what that little squirt thing is for, and I’ll be dammed if I can tell the difference between the regular setting and the steam setting. When I was in the States, I just “fluffed things up” if they were wrinkled….or I took them to the dry cleaners. These days, I actually have to put time aside to haul out the ironing board and set out to restore my clothes to wearable status. It’s a whole new world, and I’m not sure I like it.

So I try to avoid ironing by immediately taking the clothes out of the washer and strategically hanging them on the horse. When your washer won’t advance to the next stage, you’re basically guaranteed a monster iron session.

Anyway, as you can see, this washing machine issue is a serious one, so I have been trying desperately to do something about it. But despite calling the management company repeatedly (GRAINGER RESIDENTIAL MANAGEMENT: Here’s a little bit of bad press for you, courtesy of The OckleShow), they apparently didn’t find my dirty workout clothes to be as big of a priority as I did. So they waited, my big pile of laundry grew, and I was forced to start lugging laundry around on my back so that I could get it done when I was at Alex’s. When GRAINGER RESIDENTIAL MANAGEMENT finally did send some guy out to take a look, he gave it a professional diagnosis of: “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

So here I am, back to square one, with nary a sign of having a functioning washing machine ever again. I’m about THIS CLOSE to having to go to a laundromat (or “launderette” if you’re British)—something I swore I would never do again sohelpmegod the day I moved out of my first apartment in Chicago at age 23.

Then again, I also swore I would not post to my blog if I didn’t have anything worthwhile to say….and see where that got me…sitting here, writing 800 words on laundry. So you know, things change.

Anyway, so I know you’ll all be waiting with bated breath to see what comes of this whole laundry debacle. In the meantime, I’ll do what I always do, and take it as an excuse to go shopping.