COLUMN: Washer/Dryer

If you grew up watching The Jetsons like me, don't you feel cheated a little?

For a good portion of my childhood, I fully expected that once I became an adult, I would live in a house in the sky, drive a flying car, get around on moving sidewalks, and own a sassy robot maid that did my every bidding.

Well, thus far the future seems woefully lacking in sassy robot maids. There isn't a moving sidewalk in sight. And, apart from that one time I took a backroads hill in the country a little too fast, my car hasn't had much flight time whatsoever. I hate to say it, but the future's kind of a rip-off.

I guess The Jetsons got a FEW things right. We do have video phones, smart watches, and flatscreen TVs. Siri isn't especially sassy, but she WILL answer questions, give me directions, and tell me lousy jokes. There was a time when the internet probably sounded every bit as far-fetched and futuristic as flying cars, and now I feel like I'm in mortal danger of being cut adrift from society anytime I leave the house without a smartphone in my pocket. In a lot of ways, we ARE every bit as future-cool as The Jetsons.

But this week, I took future-cool up a notch at Casa Del Shane.

If you happened to read last week's column, you know I had a bit of an issue recently wherein my basement decided to temporarily identify as a swimming pool. With the whole basement torn up and drying out, it was the perfect opportunity for an appliance upgrade.

My old washer and dryer came with the house, and I've never been a big fan. I honestly don't think they were too great when they were spanky new, let alone a couple decades old. The washer's spin cycle made the whole unit convulse up and down like it was at a Ramones gig at CBGBs circa 1979. It was about as loud as a Ramones gig, too. The dryer seemed more concerned with slowly turning all my clothes into lint than it did cleaning them. As long as I had everything disconnected and the basement torn apart, I figured I might as well use the opportunity to step up my laundry game.

I am now Future Laundry Awesome Shane Guy. I've had my new washer & dryer for three days now, and I'm still basking in this strange novelty feeling where, for the first time in my life, I actually WANT to do laundry. I'm guessing this sensation will pass in about two hours.

This is perfect timing, because two hours is also roughly the length of time it takes to wash one load of whites in the new washer, which is why I'm very confused. I kind of assumed that a high-tech, high-efficiency washer of the future would mean that your clothes cleaned in record time. My old funky washer would clean a load of clothes in roughly 25 minutes and then the dryer would take roughly an hour to beat them into submission.

These new futuro machines are the exact opposite. It only takes my new dryer about a half hour to fully dry a load of clothes, but that's because the washer has spent the past hour-and-a-half whirling them into oblivion. The load of whites I just did seriously had a 20-minute spin cycle. I would think that after five or ten minutes of spinning, you'd exhaust the limits of physics when it comes to spinning away water molecules, but I am clearly no laundry scientist (as exemplified by the little specks on many of my t-shirts from the day I learned the hard lesson of why you SHOULDN'T just toss a dishrag in the laundry that you just used to clean your counter with a Clorox spray.

It turns out "high efficiency" doesn't mean "I get things done fast." Instead, it must mean "I get things done with very little water." In my inaugural load, I was surprised to see the washer only fill up about a third of the way before it started making my clothes do the Harlem Shake. At first, I thought it was broken. Then I discovered that's "high efficiency" - it cleans your clothes in WAY less water, but it takes twice as long because it needs to shimmy all your clothes down into the small tidepool of water it's working with. I'm going to save quite a bit on my next water bill, which is great, because I'll need it for the power bill increase from running my washer for twice as long. 

It took a while, but I did eventually discover the future technologies at play in this washer/dryer unit. Growing up, whenever our family dryer would finish a cycle, it made an alert that sounded like a sad clown honking an air horn. When my old dryer here finished a load, it had the unlimited gall to simply shut off without issuing ANY kind of alert. My NEW dryer, however, plays a spirited one-minute-long electronic fanfare of beeps and boops that sounds like Kraftwerk covering a sea shanty. Clearly, this was well worth emptying my savings for.

So here's to you, new washer and dryer. At the end of the day, they clean my clothes pretty well and they're about eleventy times quieter than their predecessors. They might not be flying cars, but I still feel like I'm living just a little farther in the future than I was last week. I still don't have a sassy maid, but I DO now have a dryer that just sent me a text message because it talked to my washer, found out it's washing a load of delicates, and is wondering if it needs to set itself to "tumble dry low." If that's not the future, I dunno what is.