Excitement Around the Apartment

The horror, the horror

Though I'm not a bomb-defuser or neurosurgeon, I feel a certain kinship with people in these professions whenever I do laundry. The smallest slip-up, overlooked detail or incautious motion invites disaster. After the rinse and spin cycles have been completed on the washer side, one must remove last week's laundered clothes from the dryer and ever-so-carefully pile them upon the mountain of clothes from weeks' past that still lingers atop the machine. Then, and only then, can any washer-to-dryer transfer occur. One must be careful during this process not to drop the wet clothes on the dubiously clean tile or knock over the precarious tower of dry clothes. Once the wet clothes have been secured inside the tumbler, and this is the tricky part, the dry clothes must be slid en masse from dryer top to washer top in order to program the cycle and clear the lint trap. What makes this transfer truly life-or-death is that an orphan sock or favorite t-shirt might be inadvertantly knocked into the grit and spiderwebs betwixt the back of the machines and the unfinished brick of the laundry closet. And once that happens, it's gone. Lord only knows what resides in that often-flooded labyrinth of tubes and piping. Laundry's dangerous and stressful work, but somebody has to do it.