The Saga of the Washing Machine

The Saga of the Washing Machine

Day 1, Saturday: We arrive in Alice and plan to get some laundry done. This is suddenly bumped up in priority when Koa throws up all over his clothing and socks and our kitchen floor. Brice turns on the faucet to let hot water into our washing machine, and it spray/leaks. So he turns it off. We try the cold water. Nothing. Happily, we also have a laundry room sink, so Brice does a bit of handwashing. Using our mop handle as an agitator. Because barf laundry is gross.

Day 2, Sunday: We take the day off from worrying about laundry.

Day 3, Monday: I call maintenance. They say they’ll send someone on Tuesday.

Day 4, Tuesday: At 5:05 pm, I suddenly realize no one has come. I call, and the office is closed.

Day 5, Wednesday: I call maintenance first thing. The plumber comes a few hours later and fixes the leaky hot water, makes sure the cold is working, and leaves me to start my laundry.

I get two loads of laundry done before I realize something odd: The “warm” load is steaming hot (literally). The “cold” load is steaming hot (still literally). When I turn off the hot faucet to try to force cold, we get no water at all.

Day 6, Thursday: I am now on a first-name basis with Sharon, the maintenance office lady. She’s very nice, by the way, very friendly. I let her know about the “cold” laundry, and she sends out the plumber again. I’m pretty sure they’re thinking, “Stupid Americans can’t turn the faucets the right way.”

The plumber comes. It turns out that, at least in this case, I am not a stupid American. Sure, the cold water hose works, but it still doesn’t come into the washer. The plumber informs me I need the actual machine serviced, not just the plumbing.

Sharon calls to schedule a new machine to be delivered to me on Friday.

Day 7, Friday: The switch-out is incredibly fast. We’re talking less than ten minutes. One machine out, one machine in, done. While the nice service guy is finishing up, Ammon comes to talk to him, informing him that he let a bee in the open door. The man chats with Ammon, pointing out that without bees, we’d have no honey and no flowers. Ammon then tells him that if there was no honey, the bears would start breaking into the human houses to try to get all our stores of honey. This is all very important because Ammon is adorable and distracting.

I start up a load of laundry before he leaves, to make sure it’s working. Hooray! We have cold water! The maintenance guy leaves, and Ammon and I hang out in the living room while the other kids play in the spare room. Ten, maybe twenty minutes pass.

Ammon gets up to walk through the kitchen (which is connected to the laundry room) to join his siblings. There is a strange, sloshing sound.

The whole kitchen and dining room floor is flooded.

I call Sharon. Hysterical laughter.

The maintenance fellow and his partner are back again to help us clean up the mess. (Oh, I’m so glad they came to help clean it up because it would have taken hours with just me and the kids and our towels and wimpy mop.) It turns out that Ammon was so charming with his deep thoughts about bears and honey that the maintenance guy forgot to connect the drainage hose to the sink. He is abjectly apologetic. I can only laugh. These things happen, after all.

Day 7, later. I do several more loads of laundry. Everything works. The dryer is kind of wimpy, but who really cares at this point? We have clean clothing! More than we even have hangers for! We sigh happily.

The End