If you have never gone shopping for a washer and dryer go ahead and save yourself the trouble now by turning on the oven, allowing it to heat up, and then dropping the whole thing on the back of your head. That’s sort of like the first store you go to. It gets worse from there.
Now, some might argue that all you do is go to a local store, find a name brand, and plunk down your cash. These people place time over value and are the better for it. For my wife and I it turned into a two day odyssey deep within the bowels of Hell–sometimes depicted as both Sears and Menards. Dante must have been thinking of major home appliances when he penned The Divine Comedy. Washer and dryers keep one another company in the Ninth Circle of Hell with Judas.
I have no idea what a washer does other than mix water, detergent, and my shirts together. This became painfully clear to me as I read the laundry list (har har) of features for each one. Do I want my clothes getting steamed? Is steam healthy for them? If Bruce Willis films and video games have taught me anything, it’s that it isn’t for me. Everything else on the feature list seemed to imply that my clothes are far more fragile than I, as there was a big premium on there being minor gradations of water temperature. My own shower has only two–freeze your butt off and boil it off.
One feature they love to plug is the RPMs of the washer. I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to take my new Whirlpool down to the drag strip anytime soon. Such arms races must be purely for marketing, because I can’t imagine an extra hundred RPM is what my clothes need. It’s already cramped and dark in there, do we really need to see how much we can push the metaphysical limits of cotton? Are my clothes planning a trip to the moon?
We finally purchased a set, but that just begins the anxiety over waiting for the delivery. Then, once delivered, there’s a great sense of anticlimax. I just invested my money into boxes that set alone in their own little room, with only a couple of hours of work a week to tie them down. I bought my retired in-laws.
