Saturday, May 11, 2013

The Malevolent Machine

The Face of Evil
Unlike most other clothes dryers, which are little more than highly evolved, sock eating Venus Flytraps, my dryer is a conscious, sentient organism. It knows I'm an empiricist and it likes to amuse itself by fucking with my ability to perform inductive reasoning.

Whenever I wash my socks they always come out of the dryer inside-out. They don't go in that way so I know dryer is the culprit. I haven't discovered the mechanism it uses to accomplish this feat, but after seeing it happen hundreds of times, I've surrendered and started turning my socks inside-out before loading them in the dryer. I was subsequently dismayed when my socks then came out the same way they went in. On the next load I turned my back to the dryer while reversing the socks. I wrapped them in a towel to conceal them from view before loading them in the drum. I should have reviewed my dryer anatomy first. Apparently, a dryer's eyes are on the inside. 

After doing a few hundred more loads, I finally accepted that the dryer had stopped flipping my socks and I resumed loading them normally. It immediately started reversing them again. I tried tying them in knots, and when they emerged still knotted I thought I had finally won. But then, on closer inspection, I realized that the bastard had unraveled, reversed and then retied my foot wear.

The dryer has an optional rack for shoes and other items you don't want tossed around. It's not an optimal method for drying socks, capacity is dramatically reduced, but I was no longer concerned with efficiency, only victory. I carefully placed three pairs of socks on the rack, set the timer for 60 minutes and uncorked a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck (now $2.49) to celebrate my ultimate conquest. 

When the buzzer sounded I sprinted to the laundry room and yanked open the dryer door. The rack was empty but the lint trap was full. 

There's no escaping the perverse metaphysics of a Kenmore.
----------------------------------------------------------
Just a little silliness for the Moonshine grid at Yeah Write.


11 comments:

  1. My dryer does the same with t-shirts. Drives me batty.

    ReplyDelete
  2. mine has a thing for underwear. It worries me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Could it be that your socks are heavier on the inside and that extra weight, however slight, causes this effect in the tumbling? Or it might be magic.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm completely baffled.

    ReplyDelete
  5. First of all, it's not going unnoticed that you are actually "doing" laundry. High five from a wife!!! I have informed both my boys (big and small) that if they don't put their tee shirts and socks into the laundry right side out, I have no plans to reverse them (and I don't). It never occurred to me that the Frigidare and Kenmore have a conspiracy.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is why I am a fan of the Jack Reacher method in which you buy new clothes on a regular basis so you never have to wash any.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Dude, that's NOTHING compared to what my washing machine does. This bastard doesn't even return half of my socks!

    ReplyDelete
  8. HOW? LIKE HOW? My poor Ms. Goody-Dryer has never done a thing like this. This event is almost supernatural!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Love it!

    In my house, only the boy's (including the husband) socks come out like that. Finally, I went on strike and just started bundling them like that - I'm so tired of always being the one to turn them back.

    But I'd still like to know what the dishwasher does with all of my spoons...

    ReplyDelete
  10. I would just like to to get matching pairs back out of my dryer! That would be a miracle!

    ReplyDelete