Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Tumble Dryer

289 words

When moving to our current flat we first bought a washing machine on eBay which has served us well since. Then we wanted to get a tumble dryer as well as nobody likes to dry clothes in their rooms and tumble dried clothes look and feel smoother, so tumble dryers are great (well they aren’t for the loads of energy they consume… but that little eco-warrior in me only goes so far). And they’re even greater for your smoking flatmates as their freshly washed clothes can actually smell freshly washed that way.

But tumble dryers are hard to get. Particularly the condensing kind. People just don’t sell them, particularly not in this part of the country. And the people who do are of the dumb kind – the one we managed to get turned out to not be one of the condensing kind despite being explicitly advertised to be. So we gave up… but around christmas my dad saw someone selling one around their place in the local paper’s classifieds. And for just €50 as well. So after consulting my flatmates I got that one.

It’s ten years old but looks decent. And it’s a Miele – so it has at least another ten years to run (What’s good enough for Steve Jobs is good enough for us you might say. Add a little criticism on Mr Jobs here who likes well engineered goods for himself but sells stuff that has a >50% chance of breaking in its first year). So far I’m quite happy with it. The only problem might be that the flatmates forget to empty the condensed water tank and the ‘Flusensieb’ (lint catcher?) because forgetting either will keep the machine from working properly.

Photo of the tumble dryer

January 16, 2006, 0:54

Comments

Comment by Nicholas Riley: User icon

Could you explain the usage of “der Blockwart” here? I’ve done some searching and can’t find a resource that unambiguously explains this usage (is it supposed to be humorous?)

I’ve generally seen the lint catcher referred to as a “lint trap”. And yes, nobody ever bothers to clean the one in our shared dryer either, despite the many signs requesting that we do so. Luckily it seems to accumulate lint very slowly, so it is not such a big deal.

January 20, 2006, 18:51

Comment by ssp: User icon

The Blockwart was a kind of Nazi caretaker. Perhaps they had more important functions for real, but usually they’re depicted as people who make sure the people living in their block ‘behave’.

So these days when someone is caring too much to ensure things are done right, other’s might tell him to not mimic a Blockwart. You’ll often find that expression on messageboards or newsgroups where it’s used for people who do nothing but complain about people posting off-topic. Recently, for the spying aspect of Blockwarts, it has also been used in discussion of things like CCTV or other modern surveillance techniques.

So to turn the annoyance of my flatmates into a smile, I decided to include that ‘signature’.

January 20, 2006, 18:53

Comment by dan: User icon

In the style of aol, me too!

There’s now such a bad feeling in the house that if anyone forgets to empty the linen trap or condenser everyone else gets to hear about it.

And as for making ‘dried clothes look and feel smoother’ they also start destroying them… Some of my favourtite old t-shirts which have withstood the ravages of many indie clubs are now looking slightly distressed after only 6 months.

And the German guy in my lab didn’t know who a ‘Blockwart’ would be either…

January 20, 2006, 18:54

Comment by d.w.: User icon

A couple of months ago, I spent 4 days working onsite at a huge N. American appliance manufacturer (name withheld, but it shouldn’t be too hard to guess) setting up a compute cluster and learned more about clothes washers and dryers than I thought possible. It was fun to see the kind of engineering analysis that goes into the design — fluid dynamics, heat deformation, rotation forces, etc.

January 20, 2006, 18:56

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