Little Words

It was late afternoon on a Saturday when the phone rang. Friends wanted to see us and since the fire was lit, dinner was being prepared by my own personal chef and it was freezing cold we asked them to come and visit us rather than head out into the dark, cold night. So they said they would be there within the hour.

Now let me explain something. My little gang of cleaners are .... well how do I phrase it .... not that eager to clean. I must admit that pushing a vacuum cleaner around is not that onerous but then again it is also not a delight (except when odor de dog has gone for a few short hours) and mopping with the Shark is not exactly difficult but then again it does not come with any degree of excitement either. A clean house is nice but eating off the floor has never been my objective.

All of this is a very long winded way of saying that I had to do some cleaning and tidying before the friends arrived. My mother always said that people came to visit you and if they didn't like your house the way it was then let them not visit again. It is a philosophy which I have applied, to a limited degree, to my life but my mother would never have not mopped, polished, dusted and swept five days a week which I must admit is not generally the number of days that my house is cleaned from top to bottom. Still it is rarely a swamp but it can be messy and in need of a vacuum (don't ever do the white glove test in my house!) but otherwise clean(ish).

The table in the kitchen is most probably the one place where there is usually a pile of mess. Not only do two little people eat there but the adults can use it is a dumping ground for mail and books and things that they have in their hands when some one under the age of four requires assistance. So I whipped off the plastic coated tablecloth that I use to protect the glass top and rushed to the laundry room. I threw the tablecloth into the washing machine along with half a dozen tea towels (for some reason I have collected two drawers fill of these colourful items and find myself washing at least six a day), turned on the machine and left the room.

At midnight I returned to remove the items from the machine and put them in the dryer. I turned the timer on for fifteen minutes, put the dial to low heat and went about my business. When I switched off the dryer and the lights all was well.

Oh what a false sense of security lack of knowledge gives you. Come Monday my dearest youngest daughter opened the dryer and uttered a loud gasp of horror. She walked into the kitchen carrying something that resembled what might have been a tablecloth. It was destroyed.
"Oh dear," I raised my eyebrows. "That's wrecked."
She threw a look my way that spoke volumnes.
"Come and see the dryer," she invited me.
I was still unwise as to the outcome of an application of low heat to plastic backed tablecloths. Forty decades ago an employee of my parents discovered that a hot iron placed on a swimming costume results in the costume disappearing! Now it was my turn to recall one or two of my school lessons as well as the fact that common sense had clearly not been used.
Let me just say that yellow plastic melted into the bag of an almost new dryer is not a pleasant sight. My stomach flipped and flopped. My jaw dropped open and my eyes widened in horror. My first thought was "%^^&%^&%!@%#$%@$!%$&&*(*()*#(*@^$7 am I going to do!" My second one was "He'll kill me!" Third one "Can I make it to Texas to hide out with John and Rose before he finds me?" And then when I could breath I realised that Google was invented for just these occasions.

After entering the key search words I chuckled. Yes folks I am not alone in the dim wit corner of the ring! There were people who had placed three shower curtains in the dryer and then turned it on for an hour, people who have put childrens shoes into the dryer without realising that most of the shoes of today are ... plastic. There were people who had found plastic objects melted into clothing and people who mistakenly left make-up in a pocket, lipsticks, biros, fountain pens ... and the list is goes on. There were actually some sensible answers amongst the "Okay if you are this stupid you deserve to climb in the dryer yourself and have someone switch it on!" variety. One was to use bicarb as a version of Vim. Another said fill a black back with ice and hold it against the back of the dryer until the plastic becomes brittle and can be easily removed (of course there was no instruction to NOT put the bag in the dryer and turn it on so I was not surprised to see that someone had actually put a huge bag of ice in a dryer and turned it on so that the ice moved around .... Need I say more!) Another suggested using a hair dryer to warm the plastic and make it easier to remove. My only idea was to bribe my daughter to spend the remainder of the afternoon on her knees while she peeled off the plastic using a number of techniques whilst I chased small creatures around the house and tried to convince the one with speech that Papa did not need to know what I had done.

Needless to say we had an Art Linkletter moment that evening as we sat around the table eating dinner. Brandon could not resist it. His lovely brown eyes twinkled with glee as he asked Papa to guess what his Mummy had been doing all afternoon. Mom and I tried to distract him but without any success. So the sad and sorry story was told. To his credit Papa maintained an air of calm although I suspect that he was wondering if I could be awarded the Idiot of the Household Prize of the year.

The dryer is okay. It has a somewhat weathered appearance, rather like it's users, and so far no clothes have suffered but I am still cautious of using the thing. Youngest Daughter has spent more of her valuable time picking away at the remainder of the plastic and we don't use it for longer than twenty minutes at a time.

I am busy composing a letter to the manufacturers to suggest that all dryers come with an alarm system that goes off when something begins to adhere to the inside of the machine. It might be an excellent idea but I suspect that there are some, no finger pointing please, who would spend at least ten minutes wondering where the sound was coming from before taking action.

My solution: disposable clothing and linens!