All Spun Up

We haven’t had a fully functioning washing machine since Tuesday of last week, and I’m starting to seriously lose my mind. I’m way behind on laundry, and it just keeps piling up.

The washing machine that we have in The Laundry Room of Infinite Sadness is one that the landlord bought, refurbished, from Ken The Cumbrian Handyman. Of course, I use the term “refurbished” loosely, because the machine is a piece of junk. For the first few weeks we were here, it was fine. But about two weeks ago it started acting glitchy. Now, it barely works… It seems to function on only one setting (hot). Even when it does work, it traps the clothes inside the front-loading machine through a lock mechanism that constantly jams and won’t budge. When the door clamps shut at the end of a cycle, the only solution is to unplug the machine, reset it, run another cycle, and hope the problem doesn’t repeat itself. Which it usually does.

Since Ken guaranteed the machine when the landlord bought it, every time we have a problem with it we have to go through Ken. Ken’s “repairs” (which so far have consisted of him coming over once, unplugging & replugging the machine, and leaving in a huff) are free, so the landlord doesn’t want to call someone else in to look at the problem.

It’s starting to make me crazy. It takes forever to do a single load. The load I just coaxed the machine into releasing had to go through four cycles before it would spit my clothes back out. It seems like such a waste of time, energy, and resources. My only hope is that the electric and water bill, which the landlord pays for, will be so high this month that he finally agrees to replace the machine.

A side rant: I should also mention that Ken *still* hasn’t moved his last two cars out of our driveway: A Jeep and a Suzuki. He told Matt some sort of sob story about how he drove over here in the Suzuki intending to take away the Jeep, only to find that the Jeep had broken down. Then, he got back into the Suzuki to leave, only to find that *it* had broken down too. All of this also apparently happened in the dead of night, while we were sleeping.

Let me just say that I find his story HIGHLY dubious.

The weirdest part of all of this is that we were in virtually the exact same situation back in Colorado with our neighbors Carol and Martha. Between Carol and Martha, they have three non-operational cars parked on the street outside our house. None of the cars have moved in almost a year, with the exception of Carol’s truck, which was smashed up in a hit-and-run accident where someone plowed into the car as it sat parked on the street in front of my house. The hit and run accident damaged two trucks, actually: One of Carol’s and one of Martha’s. Martha’s truck is still sitting in the accident site, in the same pile of shattered glass it’s been broken down in since December. Carol’s, mercifully, was towed after a month due to the fact that when it was hit, the car was thrown up onto our lawn. (Still, that took about a month of calls to the Fort Collins police before anything was done about it.)

I guess I’m just saying that it’s a little weird that we moved thousands of miles away from all of the broken down car shenanigans on our Colorado street, only to have the exact same problem play itself out again here. (Our neighbor, Sondra, even called the police in Maryport to complain about the cars. The Maryport police seem to care about the problem just about as much as the Fort Collins police did.)

I feel kind of like I’m in that movie Groundhog Day, doomed to repeat the same problem over and over again.