Hot Air

Tonight I am going to discuss......lessee.......dryers. Yea. Dryers. Why dryers? Because dryers are the backbone of make-work for men with working wives, since no man worthy of his masculinity is going to dust. First came this asinine idea that in order to clean dirt out of clothes, you have to wet them and churn them around, basically beating them to death and shortening their life-span. Why the hell didn't they just invent a vacuum cleaner for jeans? They suck the dirt right out of carpets, even beat the poor things with those little brushes going some god-awefull RPM. No, they had to build this huge water and electricity hog that you take clothes you wore once and wet, churn and spin them to death, leaving you with these water-logged, heavy wads of textiles that now have to be dried back out. Oh, and you have to help this process along with detergents, which sucks even more money out of your pocket.

So, you now need the washing machines evil twin, the dryer, to finish this insane process. The washing machine spun about 23% of the water out of those jeans, and probably went out of balance doing so, causing your home, if it's up on blocks like mine, to change it's location according to the Global Positioning System. You are now left with a big pile of cloth that weighs enough to give you a hernia, only lucky you, you have to pull and pry each item separately out of the drum, untangling and pulling apart bra strap hooks, velcro, and other thin strappy things that ALWAYS get tangled up in the process. OK, so now you have transferred these sopping wet items into the maw of the dryer, whose door for some strange reason is on the FRONT of the machine instead of the top as was with the washing machine. Go figure. You are now met with a wide array of choices on exactly how you want your wet clothes made dry again. You get to choose between damp, sorta-dry, almost dry but not quite, perfectly dry except for the really thick items like jeans, and FRIED. And, you get to choose what temperature of air you wish to inflict upon these textiles, something like cold, lukewarm, sorta-hot, uncomfortably hot, and THE WINDS OF HADES. Hopefully you are somewhat smart and know intuitively that the higher setting gets the job done quicker, so you crank that puppy up to FULL BLOWN, toss in a thin little, waxy feeling sheet of white rag that will prevent your clothes from releasing an electromagnetic pulse when you open the door and pull a piece out, frying all your electronics and disabling every automobile in the neighborhood. You also intuitively know that if this machine had a meter on it showing in dollars and cents how much electricity it was using to do this, you would probably have a stroke, but then again, if you really cared, you would have hung these clothes on a clothesline outside and let the sun do it for you for free.

You can discover many lost items with the aid of a dryer. You will know that you lost something by the clanging sound you hear as your clothes dry. Most people by the age of 32 can tell by the tone of these clangs exactly how much money in change they just found courtesy of their dryer. Dull thuds signify that if you forgot to turn the heat down to "reasonable", those tennis shoes are coating the drum with melted latex, which will explain why you will be greeted by a flame thrower when you open the door.

It would have occurred to most reasonable people that combining these two functions into one machine would have saved alot of steps and work, but for some strange reason, it was decided that one machine doing both jobs costs more to build than two machines doing each job separately. And, if you really want to spend an arm and a leg, find a washer with the door on the front just like the dryer and pay the premium.

The coolest (is that a bad pun?) dryers around are those huge commercial jobs you find in laundry mats that can tumble a full-grown person, although it has never been proven they can actually dry one out, without killing him at least. You can put something like 32 loads of laundry into one of these suckers, and if you feed this thing with enough quarters and wait several days, it will actually dry it all. After having sat around staring at those portholes like some kind of weird kaleidoscope for hour upon numbing hour, I decided it was worth the extra few dollars to just let the laundry mat owners do it for me. Now that I actually own my own dryer, I get to pay myself to do it, and I come cheap, sad to say.

Sooner or later they have to add a microwave to these things to speed up the process. Then we'll get to watch the sparks fly as all those metallic objects create a lightening show, if your microwave dryer happens to have a porthole to watch the fireworks, because you discovered some more change you lost.

Next week we will examine the toaster, and that secret location between "no effect whatsoever" and "cremated" on the dial that is never in the same place twice.