Monday, August 21, 2006

Home Ownership

Well, apartment ownership at least. Most of the time, it's great.

Last night, I threw a load of clothes into the dryer. About 20 minutes in, I went to pull out some of Scratch's shirts so I could finish them "on the line" (meaning the backs of some chairs.) And it smelled BAD. Worse than when your vacuum cleaner has a bad belt. Like burnt rubber and plastic.

Did you know that about 14,000 dryer fires occur each year, according to the CDC? And most of them are lint-trap related. I'm a good lint trapper. I vacuum that sucker out. I clean the tray and make sure water can run through it. Yes, I am a nerd about it! And still we are punished by this broken dryer that made all the clothes smell industrial-strength BAD.

If we didn't own it, we could call the landlord and be all gripey about why isn't it fixed yet? But, because we own it, I have to be faced with the reality that I don't know any dryer-repair people, and I have to trust the Yellow Pages. I hate not "knowing a guy." How old are you before you know a guy in almost any field? I want to be there. I want to be able to go to the fridge, to some faded list of phone numbers hand-written stuck under a magnet, and see the number of who to call when X, Y, or Z happens. Who's got that list? Can I borrow it? Or at least make a copy real quick?


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