Appliance of the Week 2: The “Dryer”

Welcome, once again, to our special “Appliance of the Week” feature!  What’s that?  You say I missed a week?  Well that’s curiously apropos, since today’s appliance is So Last Week!  Yes, I’m talking about YOU, “Dryer”!  I have learned to circumvent your deviltry, yes I have!

But first things first.  Here’s the miscreant:

That’s the “dryer” up top, of course, and his partner-in-crime, the washing machine, down below.  This is not that different than our set-up at home, frankly, except that at home the dryer holds less than the washer, which holds less than the laundry basket.  Here, I noticed right away that the laundry basket holds exactly the volume that the washer and “dryer” hold – basically, one outfit for each of us, plus some extra socks.

Sure, it’s small.  That’s not what torques me.  Similarly, the controls are in Japanese, as one might expect:

But hey, that’s why I learned katakana, right?  I know which indicator light is for the hiitaa, which is the taimaa, and which the ko-oh-su.  I’ve even learned the kanji for high (or maybe hot?), low (or maybe cool?), and minute (that one I know I’ve understood correctly).  And of course, as you may have anticipated, the big orange button is the Sutaato.

(For those who don’t know the trick to katakana: hiitaa=heater, taimaa=timer, ko-oh-su=course, sutaato=start)

Except that it isn’t, for some reason.  You have to push the red-circled button first.  The one with no katakana to explain it.  But hey, ha ha, let the machine have its little joke!  This is not the kind of thing that makes me want to take a baseball bat to its rusty chassis!

Here’s the interior:

Ha ha!  Roomy!  And boy howdy does it get hot!  It heats up the whole damn house, it’s so hot!  Someday we’re gonna open it and find our underpants on fire, yes indeed!

That Wheel of Terror at the back is the filter.  Let’s clean it, shall we?

Erm.  Assuming we can get it out.  Hang on.  There’s a trick to it, clearly.  A trick I haven’t worked out yet, but when I DO, watch out… urng… world…

Okay.  Here.  I saved you some lint.  See how I’ve started peeling it off the fine mesh?  That looks straightforward enough, doesn’t it?  That’s because you haven’t yet noticed the evil that lies beneath:

Underneath the fine mesh is a layer of pure WTF.  It’s like thick felt.  I don’t know why it’s there, except that apparently the fine mesh isn’t fine enough – an awful lot of lint gets through.  And yes, it clings to the felt.  And what am I supposed to do, exactly?  Pick lint out of the felt?  You try it.  It can’t be done, with human fingers.  I sometimes take a fork to it, but it doesn’t help.

But you know, even that I could forgive, if only this “dryer” got the clothes dry!  How a machine can be simultaneously so hot and so ineffective, is beyond me.

When I was a kid, we used to hang our clothes out on a line, and I remember thinking to myself quite clearly: No Way.  This is ASS.  I’m happy to save energy any other way, but my clothes are going in the dryer, thankyew.  But here, the lack of dryness has given me pause.  Because you know this machine, for all its incompetence, isn’t using any LESS energy than my machine back home, even if I have to run it four times as long.

And so, yes, on sunny days, I am hanging up my clothes.  They don’t really get dry in the house, either (but at least they’re not ripping through the kilowatts while doing it), but on a sunny day, if you hang the clothes up on the balcony, they will eventually dry.

Stiff as board, too.  But we can’t have everything.

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