Laundry is a pretty dull task, and so one’s mind does tend to wander in the course of doing it.* For some inexplicable reason, my mind tends to wander into the more esoteric nooks and crannies of the fascinating topic of…um…doing the laundry. I could be daydreaming about movie stars or sex or thinking of something useful like planning dinner or trying to remember how to do statistics problems… but more often I think about laundry.
e.g.:
Now, it has been my personal habit for quite a while to empty the dryer’s lint filter just before drying a load of wet laundry. Remove filter, clean off lint, replace filter, load dryer, start dryer, return to my other exciting daily activities. Dan, on the other hand, cleans the lint filter after unloading the dryer. I suspect that his way is probably more common, and for some reason in my head I’ve on several occasions gone through what I’d say, hypothetically, if he ever challenged me on my way. For the record, since moving in together, I actually do try to do it his way, so that the lint trap is clean when he puts his laundry in, otherwise he would probably just think I’m lazy or forgetful.
And so here is my brilliant defense, and why I actually think my way is, in fact, superior:
In a perfect world, of course, everyone would empty the lint filter after doing a load of laundry as a matter of course. We do not, however (and obviously) live in said perfect world. Given that the chances are somewhat high that the previous person to use the dryer** has forgotten or otherwise neglected to empty the lint trap***, the wise course of action when loading the dryer is to check the lint trap to make sure it’s been cleaned. And so I posit that as you will be removing the lint trap before running your load anyway, meaning that the lint filter gets removed twice for every load (once before, to check, and once after, to empty), it is redundant and inefficient and so it makes more sense to simplify the whole thing and just clean the filter before you use the dryer, thus reducing the number of times the filter is removed down to one.
Of course, Dan has never challenged me on this, nor has anyone else. Nor would anyone else, since it’s completely inane and irrelevant. Yet this is the kind of retarded thought processes that run through my head while doing the laundry.
*by “doing it” I meant doing laundry. Get your mind out of the gutter. I would hope one’s mind wouldn’t wander doing that other thing.
**this whole argument is based on a dryer used by multiple people. None of this matters if you’re the only one using it. In fact, I strongly suspect none of this actually matters regardless…
***this is exponentially more likely when one of the people using the dryer is 12 years old and male, by the way.
originally posted in my journal 11/13/07
— 11:46:44 AM
[997]
02/17/2008 10:49 PM Reply
Yes, but if you check both after you do a load and before, just in case you or someone else might forget before they do the next load, you make double-sure that the lint actually gets removed and therefore increase the overall efficiency of the dryer, which otherwise would use more electricity on occasion when the lint didn’t get cleaned out and it had to work harder. Never thought about this, but my wife and I may differ on this, and she probably has an opinion as strong as yours but has never shared it :-)
Me? I empty the lint catcher after a load if I remember, but usually check it before a load just to be sure. Which, I think…was my point :-)