Sometimes you gotta know what your specialty in life really is.
Case in point, when our clothes dryer was on the fritz, I found out that I did not receive the skills from my late father to take something apart, swear at it, figure out how it works, determine what went wrong, swear at it, fix it and then go on my merry way.
What I have are the skills to swear at the problem, ignore it until my wife swears at me, then I swear at life, try to fix the problem while swearing all the way and failing.
However, with our dryer, even the almighty crutch of YouTube DIY tutorials didn’t help me fix the problem. Instead, I wound up with a sharp metal corner of the dryer taking a chunk out of my knuckle when trying to replace the thermostat.
It was one of those wounds where you see a divot of skin missing, but you don’t start bleeding right away, like your body hasn’t caught up with what your eyes have seen and your mind has acknowledged.
But when it finally started to bleed, it was bad.
Figuring I didn’t want to lose consciousness, I had to do first aid, but trying to work a bandaid with a bleeding finger proved to be counterproductive as trying to brush your teeth while eating Oreo cookies; also, I always seem to get cuts on curves, nooks and crannies on my body that bandages can’t wrap around or manage to stay put.
As you’re about the read, I have no medical skills like my certified-medical-assistant wife. I didn’t have any gauze and medical tape handy and I wouldn’t know where they’re located if we did have it, so I had to resort to toilet paper and scotch tape.
Long story not as long, the dryer didn’t get fixed, so we had to order a new one. The delivery couldn’t happen for a whole week, and clothes were already piling up to the point that the basement mice were hiring Sherpas to help them get to the top of Blue Jean Peak, which was covered in snow for some reason ... or maybe that was Borax.
Anyway, the only thing we could do was go to the laundromat.
Even though I hate everything about laundry, I was actually kind of interested in going to the laundromat. I hadn’t done that since my bachelor days, and I wondered if anything had changed.
Well, the first thing that changed was the fact that I’m no longer a bachelor. I carried three baskets full of laundry for four people into a business that was filled with so many people they must have been giving away free COVID-19 vaccines with every dry-clean service.
However, some things about the laundromat have not changed, which is the fact that everybody looks at you. You can deny it all you want, but it’s true; I know that because I look at everyone, too.
Even armed with that fact, it’s still pretty unnerving to know everyone was watching/criticizing my folding techniques and especially unnerving when I realized that they were looking at me folding not only my unmentionables, but also the unmentionables of my wife, my daughter and my mother.
Question: Are they still considered “unmentionables” if I repeatedly mention them in print?
Again, I know for a fact laundromat people stare at unmentionables because I was staring at a lady wheeling around that little flat shopping cart for clothes with her collection of unmentionables hanging from the cart’s overhead rack.
Anyway, the dryer was delivered and, much to my disappointment, the store didn’t hook it up upon delivery. What can I say? Reading the fine print isn’t my specialty either, which is why my soul is currently owned by three different demonic deities.
So, I was back to attempting manual labor and rushing back to the store to buy those last-minute and necessary parts like a gas hose because, again, I didn’t read the fine print that just happened to be the same font and point size of the regular print, but that’s all schematics.
Short story shorter: I was able to hook up the dryer and avoid a second gas leak/explosion with the aid of reading some of the instructions, watching competent people do it with greater ease on YouTube, swearing and FaceTiming my brother and both of us swearing together.
When it was all said and done, everyone else’s specialties brought that laundry saga to an end, and , of course, I was there to write all of this crazy crap down and present it to you.
That’s my specialty.
According to Hofmann is written by staff reporter Mark Hofmann of Rostraver Township. His books, “Good Mourning! A Guide to Biting the Big One...and Dying, Too” and “Stupid Brain,” are available on Amazon.com. He co-hosts the “Locally Yours” radio show on WMBS 590 AM every Friday.
May 09, 2021 at 01:00PM
https://www.heraldstandard.com/community_life/according_to_hofmann/according-to-hofmann-the-laundry-soggy----i-mean-saga/article_5d9e1e14-af5d-11eb-9a15-a7eea0598e7e.html
According to Hofmann: The laundry soggy -- I mean “saga” - Uniontown Herald Standard
https://news.google.com/search?q=Laundry&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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