I'm in Love!

Let me explain. When I saw water escaping from the bottom of my old (and I mean old ) washing machine, I realized that its days—or hours—were numbered and that those commercials about the Maytag repair man having nothing to do were somewhat exaggerated. I have an impeccable sense of timing. You are talking to the woman who had a sewer back-up on Christmas Day, when, or maybe because, there was a houseful of people wanting to eat. And we would need water to do dishes! In this case I was about to take a trip to Chicago. Fortunately I could eke by on my already-washed clothes, but I needed to have a washing machine up and running by the time I returned.

My research this time consisted of running across the driveway to borrow my neighbor's Consumer Reports and calling my sister-in-law who had earlier been telling me that she had bought two washing machines which she hated and returned before settling on a third. She told me that the first two were not "washing" machines, they had merely given her laundry a shower. I soon found out what she was talking about.

The evening before my trip saw us visiting store number one, going on to store number two and returning to store number one. (I left number two not because of their choice of machines, but because they wanted to charge $15 to haul away the old one. A matter of principle, not $15.) My biggest problem, however, was that I wanted an old fashioned washing machine. I wanted a top loader to begin with, and then I was dismayed to discover that the new machines do not have an agitator. More roomy drums, but even the salesmen admitted that the lack of an agitator made getting laundry harder to get clean.

I settled on a Whirlpool. A plain, old fashioned Whirlpool. Being plain and old fashioned didn't exactly mean that it was inexpensive, though it was half the cost of the fancy new models with enough buttons and doo-dads to send the device into orbit. I have been doing laundry for fifty years and have never needed half the controls some of these machines have.

I ordered it and it was delivered and installed and waiting for me on my return. Could the person with whom I share the house have taken it for a test drive in my absence? Well, he could have, but at the beginning of our marriage he announced, "I don't do laundry."