Wash, Rinse and Repeat

Our washing machine has been acting strange for the past few weeks. As it counts down to the last 6 minutes of the wash-spin cycle, it gets stuck. It makes ugly wheezing sounds, like an old fiat trying to speed up. It never manages to reach that final goal of '0 minutes'. The machine runs that last 6 minutes for a couple of hours before giving up on our soggy clothes.

We've got so used to the automatic lifestyle - hurling clothes inside the machine and recovering them after a day or so, when they would still be fresh and fragrant. But after getting pampered by that habit, standing by the machine and supervising each individual procedure is quite hard.

It is indeed a problem. And we don't have any easy solution.

Won't LG, this giant superstar of white goods, have people to handle this? Yes. As devices have got complicated and problems deviling, they have made it easier for us to reach customer care. But with the same gusto, we have gotten remarkably sloppier and lethargic.

We soon found a temporary way around the problem - To achieve a washed set of clothes, we had to start the machine like any normal routine, pounce on it in that last 6 minutes, restart on another mode to drain off the water and remove the stuff after a small gap of time to avoid smelly clothes.

Of course it's a tough one to execute. After the machine got diseased, Vikrant once stuffed clothes inside on a Thursday evening and forgot about it till Saturday night. He courageously removed the wet, stinking, twisted heap of clothes then and somehow hung them to dry. We avoided that area the whole of Sunday. Inspired by the stench, we decided to take some serious action. After a brief search within the house, we found an expired warranty card with some LG contact information.

There is one LG service phone line.
There is one warranty number to identify our history with them.

All that is required is that one of us on any one working day gives a call to them to arrange for a technician to come over at a convenient hour.

Have we done it yet? No. Here is how this typical dinner conversation goes:
"Hey we should really do something about that washing machine."
"Haan. I haven't washed clothes in a while. We have that LG number right?"
"Yes. Let's do this - I'll give them a call tomorrow. We'll ask the guy to come over on the weekend."
"Good idea."
"Hmmm...But I might be busy tomorrow. So you try calling them up. In case I find time I'll do it."
"Ok."

Wash. Rinse. And Repeat a similar conversation the next day. The best part is you can assign any voice to any one of us and it would still be true.

If the machine had completely died, we'd have been more inclined to do something about it. But no, the God of laundry had to partially screw it up so that we got a chance to exemplify our Indian 'kaam chala le' attitude. So it has been three weeks. Sometimes we succeed with the machine mode trick, sometimes we don't.

Soon it'll be Happy Holiday season and all service centre employees will be merry making at home - in their freshly washed and dried clothes; singing songs of the warm sun and dry winds. Meanwhile, our mountain of clothes would grow and cast a humid shadow over our lives, crunching our spirits like a soggy cereal.

I know we should act on this soon. But the inertia retarding us is so unassailable that I think we'll compensate with extra shopping this month rather than make that ONE phone call.

So in case you haven't decided yet, I'd like underwears as gifts for Christmas - preferably the washed ones.