Zen and the art of domestic appliance maintenance

Welcome, sufficiently laundered reader, as I take you on a journey of domestic calamity and strife. Amidst shocking news that maybe we wash our clothes more often than is good for either them or for us, we were forced into some re-evaluation in Palo Alto as over the New Year the unthinkable happened: the washing machine broke.

Now getting something done which involves calling out a tradesperson is often a frustrating task back in the UK. Here in the US, frustrating is probably the wrong adjective, but leisurely is definitely appropriate. For basic maintenance tasks around the house we've been told "someone will be there tomorrow at 10am" only to have them show up halfway through the afternoon... on a different day. It's also worth noting the somewhat humbling racial divide here: typically the people who come to your home to do these things are Spanish-speaking immigrants, which makes me more than a bit ashamed of my privilege. Of course, as I reported last week, Helen's learning Spanish, so if we ever need to tell a tradesperson that we're astronauts, we have the language chops at our disposal as of this week's vocab lesson!

Our long-suffering landlady called out someone to repair the washing machine, and so it was that in early January, someone (actually a Russian this time) took a quick look at it. After a short inspection he declared that we needed a new door gasket and he'd have to order the part. This was Monday. He'd be back on Wednesday to fit it.

Well, dear reader, Wednesday came and went.

In an unusual departure for this blog, I'm going to cut a long story short. After two weeks of back and forth and complaining to the people meant to be coming to fix the machine, our landlady gave up and called someone else. This time, not one but two Russians came to look at the washing machine (they must have some great washing machine universities over in Mother Russia). Their diagnosis was much more serious: the drum has come loose on the shaft connecting it to the motor, so you need a new drum. This will cost $600, plus $1000 to fit, but surprise! They don't make that part any more anyway. So you need a new machine.

As of yesterday, we finally have washing facilities in the house again, courtesy of this shiny new machine:

What do you do if you go a month without a washing machine? Well even I wouldn't wear the same clothes for that long, dear reader, so what you do is you investigate local laundry services. This is the Bay Area, so you can get anything done without leaving the comfort of your home, and the excellent Purple Tie offer a service where they collect your washing, and bring it back clean the next day.

Our experience of this service was really good. The washing was collected when we expected, and returned lovingly washed and folded when expected. We even got a little bonus:

If you can't work it out from the picture, this is what in the UK we would call a pair of pants. If you're in the US, go and look it up. Anyway, the thing is, this pair of pants does not belong to either of the occupants of this house. I can only think that Purple Tie like us so much that they wanted to give us a reward for our customer loyalty.

Anyway, their plan has failed because with our own washing machine available, we're much more likely to use that than to be tempted into washing schemes that give us the odd pair of bonus pants. In related news, we also managed to break and then fix our freezer this week, saving us many more visits from puzzled Russians. Let's hope the rest of our appliances can hold it together, at least until the end of the pandemic.