Adventures in Laundry, Accidental Variation
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We had a super-quick visit with eldest young’un in Bangkok this week, but when you receive this email, we’re probably on a flight on our way to Italy. I say probably, because I’m pre-posting this from Bangkok, and calculating future time on two continents is my absolute limit. Where will I be at 6 am on Friday, Eastern US time? No idea.
Adventures in Laundry, Accidental Variation
So, we accidentally flooded a laundromat the evening before we left Japan.
It was only a small flood, but it was awkward.
About halfway through the wash cycle, we were sitting on a bench reading, the only customers in the room, when Lee commented (overly casually, I thought) that one of our two washers was leaking. I got up and studied the situation, and concluded that one of us (I won’t say which) had loaded the washer incorrectly, and that a bit of fabric was trapped in the door. It was our dark load. The trapped item was twisting tighter and tighter as the drum spun, while the rest of the clothes sloshed gently like they were supposed to. I pushed on the door, but it was one of those ones that locks when it’s running, and there’s really nothing you can do, short of unplugging it. Which didn’t appear to be an option.
I assumed that the trapped item was mine, because my favorite black linen shorts are pretty threadbare at this point anyway—I’m certain they’re going to disintegrate any minute now. I figured they were being shredded by the force of the twisting.
The more immediate problem was the water, which crept across the floor until the rinse cycle started, at which point it began to pour across the floor.
Another customer came in and started a load. We started poking around looking for a mop, or some way to wipe up the water. We were about to use a towel from the lost laundry pile, but the other customer intervened, and used his phone to call the emergency contact number. We don’t know what was said, but we assumed it was something along the lines of You’d better get over here before these foreign dimwits wreck the whole place.
We bowed a lot, thanked him in Japanese, and apologized in English. Then he left.
After a few minutes, to our great relief, the washers finished and we splashed through the water to get our clothes out (okay, I exaggerate, it wasn’t deep enough to splash, but it was a really wide puddle—we definitely sloshed). We put them in the dryer and sat back down, feeling like kids waiting outside the principal’s office.
Lee wondered if we could pretend it hadn’t been our washer. Then he realized there were at least 3 security cameras in the room, so there was definitely a record of the dumb tourists making the mess.
A couple of minutes later, a young couple came running in and went right to work cleaning up. I was relieved it wasn’t a cranky elderly woman (that’s what I’d been expecting, for some reason), but these two looked like the kind of couple who’d asked their parents to babysit so they could have an evening out. And we had interrupted their Saturday date-night because we couldn’t close a washing machine properly.
He scooped up the water, she mopped the floor dry, then carefully cleaned the mop and bucket and put them away. Then they tidied the area all around us, just for good measure.
One thing I learned in Japan is that bowing is the all-purpose gesture. Bowing with prayer-hands is an apology.
I said thank you in Japanese, I said I’m so sorry in English, and I bowed as deeply as I could—with prayer hands.
Hopefully they’ll let us back into the country one day, if we promise to be more careful at the laundromat.
Addendum: One of us (again, I’m not gonna say which) got told off for talking too loudly in the ‘Quiet Zone’ on the flight out of Tokyo. So all bets are off on whether they actually do let us back into Japan one day …
Take care,
Lisa
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