My pocketful of stones

I was washing a down comforter in our washer-dryer several days ago, and remembered that putting something like an old tennis shoe or a couple of tennis balls into the drying cycle helps to fluff up the down.

I didn’t have any tennis balls or old shoes around though, and was reluctant to risk a shoe that is still wearable.  After all, the rubber could melt and ruin not only the shoe but also the comforter.  I’m not that dumb.  I mean, let’s be sensible here.  So I decided to be creative.

I found a couple of plastic jars and filled them with small decorative pebbles and added them to the drum.

All went well.  But when the drying cycle was finished and I opened up the door, I saw the lid had come off one of the jars and pebbles were spread all over the place.

I took the comforter outside and shook the errant pebbles out.  But I was a little worried that some of them might have gotten into the machine’s drainage system, so it seemed a good idea to check the drainage catchment area.

It wasn’t a good idea.

When I opened it up, an alarm started and a message came up saying “Emergency flood control alerted.  Call serviceman.”

A Mickey Hands T-Shirt 

I spent another half hour reading the trouble-shooting section of the machine’s directions and fiddling with ideas of my own to determine that the only thing I could do was to follow Miele’s single line of advice and call the serviceman.  I did turn off the alarm by pulling the electric plug, but that was the height of my achievement.The serviceman came the next day but I was too embarrassed to tell him I’d done something so stupid as to actually put a couple of jars full of stones into the machine.  So I told him I’d accidentally put laundry into the wash with a pocketful of stones.  That at least impressed me – if not the serviceman – as careless rather than creatively stupid.

But stupid it was.

And it only cost me $125 to get it fixed.

Maybe I should give up trying to be creative, and simply go back to obeying rules?

On the other hand, there isn’t anything in the directions that says anything about not putting jars of stones in the laundry.