Posted on 09/30/2004 5:58:25 AM PDT by Nyboe
FIVE days without a mobile phone and 10 days without a washing machine. I could have used the landline phone but it was buried somewhere beneath the dirty laundry.
I'd hear it ringing occasionally, sandwiched between the shirts and socks, but was unable to locate it.
Granny, I kept reminding myself as I awaited the arrival of my washing machine, managed quite well without one, preferring instead to light a fire under a large copper tub every Monday morning and then proceed to boil the life out of the laundry for several hours.
I contemplated setting up a copper boiler in the apartment courtyard and doing some retro-laundry but suspected that the body corporate, whoever that was, would descend upon me.
I washed underwear in a bathroom hand basin during a recent holiday and found it to be a particularly degrading experience.
There is something unseemly about standing in a bathroom dunking one's undies in tepid, soapy water in the manner of a person making tea with a teabag.
It also is alarming to see how rapidly clean water becomes murky water, giving rise to disturbing thoughts as to why this is so.
You'd only worn them once so why is the water in which your hands are immersed the colour of the Brisbane River?
After several minutes of washing, I began to imagine that my hands were beginning to itch, doubtless the result of contracting some particularly infectious, flesh-eating virus only to be found in men's underwear.
Aaaagggh! Grabbing the tongs from a conveniently placed ice bucket, I picked up the remaining items of intimate apparel, tossed them in the shower recess, sprinkled them liberally with detergent, undressed, turned on the shower and performed an impromptu version of the tango on my washing.
I can't actually do the tango but it always seemed to involve a liberal amount of toe and heel stamping. It would have helped to have had some musical accompaniment and perhaps a glass of chardonnay and in a perfect world, a similarly attired dancing partner.
I coped as best I could but was disappointed with the results which were less than satisfactory, the underwear when it dried having assumed the malleability of a breadboard.
You all but needed a hammer to fold it.
Hand washing, then, was not an option so I sat in the apartment night after night and watched the pile of dirty laundry climb slowly towards the ceiling.
There is a hierarchical order in the way in which men use underwear which sees the best being used first, and as the days passed and I descended down the quality totem, the situation became worrisome.
I was nearing the bottom of the metaphorical barrel, reaching in and extracting daks which having already performed honourably and beyond expectation, were now being called upon to serve once more.
Age had wearied them and try though their aged elastic would to cling to my hips, the task was beyond them and invariably by mid-morning they would surrender to the superior forces of gravity, relinquish their grip and slide slowly towards my knees, descending as far as my trousers would allow.
This made for some extremely uncomfortable afternoons as any movement necessitated placing my hands in my pockets and clutching at the waistband of my underwear in order to arrest its descent.
In achieving this, I tended to crouch. I don't know why but try it and you will find that it is not possible to hold up your underwear with your hands in your pockets without leaning forward.
I looked like a man trying to walk into a Force 10 gale, hunched against an invisible force, and was followed by tittering, whispering and admonishing looks wherever I went.
Salvation arrived a few days ago in the back of the truck which delivered a washing machine which has been in more or less constant use since.
It was at the completion of Load One that I realised that I had overlooked one factor, this being my lack of a clothes line. There was, I knew, a communal clothes line somewhere in the complex but I did not trust my fellow apartment dwellers not to nick my shirts.
The underwear, I reasoned, would be safe, but not my shirts.
At the time of writing, my apartment looks like a Chinese laundry, and I mean that as a compliment to all those hard-working Chinese who have given such sterling service to the laundry industry.
Sheets decorate doors, shirts are draped across chairs and underwear dangles from coat hangers which dangle from table edges.
I'm working on the clothes line conundrum but have yet to find a solution.
The mobile phone problem also is proving difficult to surmount, due mainly to Telstra's insistence that in spite of the fact that the phone is as dead as the Democrats' electoral hopes, I still have to pay for it.
Perhaps if I give it five minutes on the spin cycle, it will start working again.
Cute! (If he'd just gone to the laundromat, it wouldn't be funny :-).
It was funny until I realized that I've used the ice tongs in hotels before.
Were you a woman, I would have gladly tried on, I mean helped you with your "intimate apparel"
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