Tuesday, May 22, 2007

You Spin Me Right Round

Last Saturday I went and bought us a new clothes dryer. I know! What exciting lives we must lead! The most exciting thing we did all weekend was buy a new major appliance.

But!

Later we did coke lines off the lid of the dryer! And then we flew down to Tiajuana where I got arrested for an unspeakable act with a donkey! Molly Ringwald was there! She danced wildy into the night and played a pair of cheap maracas!

Sorry, that’s just a re-occurring dream I have.

OK, seriously, we got a new Samsung clothes dryer thing-y. It tumbles the clothes around and blows hot air on them. That’s about as exciting as I can make it.

But!

The story really is a bit more entertaining than me plunking down the AmEx card on Saturday and then meeting the delivery dudes yesterday afternoon.

About three months ago, the old dryer essentially stopped doing its namesake duty, namely drying things. Sure, it would spin them around in counter clockwise fashion, but you could tell its heart wasn’t really in it. Mostly because the clothes would still be damp after spinning around for over an hour. Getting them all the way to dry would take hours. Painful. And since we have kids who enjoy generating dirty laundry just like they enjoy breathing, we tend to have a LOT of laundry to do. Three hours to dry one load throws a Giants Stadium sized wrench into the finely tuned Swiss watch workings of our family mechanics. People complained about not having anything clean to wear. Some people, who have easy access to credit cards, just went a bought a new shirt and pair of jeans on the way home from work (Yeah, that was me, but it was just that one time, you gonna make something of it?) And though the weather is warmer here in Utah right now, we aren’t really set up to dry our clothes on a line outside. The way our house is situated on our postage stamp sized lot, there isn’t really room for a clothes line. Though my liberal Al Gore loving soul wishes we could. The sun seems to do a fine job of drying things out (like my skin, for example), clothes seem like a natural.

Wait! Come back! I know it sounds like I’m telling a story about clothes drying now and you are probably thinking I’m going to downshift into “paint drying” mode, but trust me, it gets better!

So handy little ol’ me decided that I could fix the dryer, even though I know nothing about dryers and the electricity pumped into the beast (220) is WAY scary to me. People DIE from that stuff. Maybe I could figure out what was wrong and maybe I could replace whatever bad thing was tired and broken. (Couple too many “maybes” in that sentence, you’ll note).

Anyway, I took the dryer apart.

And put it back together again.

Which is basically a bit like how I begin to troubleshoot computer problems. “Shut it down. Restart it. Is the problem still happening?”

While I had the thing apart, I gave it a good cleaning. Found a dead goldfish, $3.82 (in nickels and pennies) and Jimmy Hoffa. Or someone who has the same build as Jimmy. Whatever.

I plugged it back in and it behaved the exact same way as before. Nonchalantly heating the air inside the drum and not really doing much drying.

Oh, and the squeaking. Seems I’d introduced a bit of a squeak into the mix. It’s possible that when I put the thing back together, I didn’t get everything back together exactly perfectly. So the machine squawked. Loudly. Intolerably loudly as a matter of fact. No lie, you could hear it WAY down the street if the laundry room door were open. It sounded like we were beating kittens in a sack with set a cheap tiajuanian maracas.

I took it back apart and fiddled around with some stuff and put it back together again but, much like Humpty Dumpty of yore, there really wasn’t any putting it back together again. Some kind of weird dryer entropy took over and we were just going to have to put up with the racket. Swearing at it to shut the HELL up didn’t seem to do any good, either.

And. Since the pieces didn’t quite fit exactly perfectly, the dryer exhibited a nasty habit of chewing up clothing. A pant leg would get caught in the moving parts and have the crap beaten out of it.

Here is the thing. You can have a lazy dryer. Or you can have a LOUD dryer. But a LOUD and lazy dryer just won’t cut it. And I have an American Express card which can fix BOTH those problems in one fell swoop. Plus the whole “eating clothes” thing was a bit of a downer.

On Saturday afternoon I walked right into Best Buy into the appliance area (after drooling on the HDTVs) and said, “I’m buying a dryer RIGHT now!” and 5 minutes later I had myself a new dryer, to be delivered on my lunch hour on Monday. Glorious capitalism at work.

Did I do ANY homework, research, fasting and praying about which dryer to purchase before buying the dryer? Not even a minute. Shocking, I know. I did buy a floor model, so I got a pretty expensive model for far fewer pesos, but I barely even know the brand name. Usually I know chapter and verse on large purchases like this, but I just wanted dry clothes in an environment that didn’t make the neighbors think we were molesting animals over here.

I went to hook the new dryer up yesterday evening and as I’m replacing the old plastic hose with shiny new aluminum hosing, I found about 17 metric tons of lint packing the sides of the ancient hose. It’s possible, quite possible, that had I merely moved heaven and earth in the first place (i.e., moved the washer so I could properly get at and replace the dryer vent/hose), that an increased air flow might have helped the old dryer not be so lackadaisical about its duties.

Maybe.

I’m afraid to ask Google about it.

1. You do realize there’s a market for reclaimed hose lint, don’t you?

   Posted by Radioactive Jam  on  05/22/07  at  05:27 AM

2. capitalism indeed.  god bless america and best buy.

   Posted by Kerstin  on  05/22/07  at  08:30 AM

3. OH Noes! I had no idea there was a secondary market for dryer hose lint! I’ve thrown away my early retirement.

   But I can get some serious cash for belly button lint, can’t I? ‘Cause I have a ton of that saved up over the years.

   It’s in a jar by the bed.

   That’s normal, right?

   Posted by jon  on  05/22/07  at  08:35 AM

4. We had sort of the same experience, but I got a new washer and dryer out of it, so it’s okay.

   on the repair front, you’re doing better than my Father In Law who, in trying to fix the ice maker, managed to make it so that the blender would only turn on when the doorbell was ringing.  I’m unclear on the details of this home repair miracle, but it was at least startling.

   Posted by Jenna  on  05/22/07  at  08:48 AM

5. Jon, just think think if you had emptied out all that lint first you would have gotten to take apart a big mechanical gizmo or purchased a brand-new big shiny thing with buttons and knobs.

   You did the right thing.

   Posted by michael  on  05/22/07  at  01:09 PM

6. That’s supposed to be wouldn’t not would, of course.

   Posted by michael  on  05/22/07  at  01:35 PM

7. I’m afraid you’re right about the lint thing. We had a similar experience a few months ago that ended with clearing out all the lint, and the dryer worked fine after that.

   On the other hand, there’s something to be said for buying new big, shiny machines.

   Posted by Autumn  on  05/22/07  at  04:12 PM

8. No… belly-button lint in jar by bed, not normal.

   You’re supposed to use special little boxes I think.

   Posted by Radioactive Jam  on  05/23/07  at  06:01 AM

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