Washing clothes for the first time was a fun experience. This is because I speak English, but my washing machine speaks Chinese. Trying to do the maiden load, I ran into some communication problems. You see I wanted to wash my clothes, but the washing machine had other ideas. It’s preference was to get them wet with soap, then hang onto them in a pool of dirty water flooded in it’s bowels.

As you can see from the picture, operation is not meant to be carried out by someone who is illiterate. Why they couldn’t just use happy descriptive pictures like most appliance manufacturers is one of the great mysteries of the Chinese civilization.

I knew that the large pink button to the right was the “on” button, for when I pushed it the machine’s lights all came on. Then venturing one button over to the left, activated it somehow as water poured into the machine. The problem was that once it went through the cycle, the water didn’t empty out. No matter how great my sequence of random button pushing was, the machine wouldn’t give up it’s soapy clench on my clothes.

As my first load of laundry was taking well over 2 hours to complete, I decided it would be best to enlist the help of a friend. Unfortunately said friend had limited experience in translating simplified Chinese characters to English (many overseas Chinese are used to the traditional characters found in HK or Taiwan). The translation came out like this:

1. start automatically
2. Make an appointment (maybe like, start in 5 minutes??)
3. Water Level (don’t know what that means)
4. EAT LAUNDRY
oh, sorry 1. Manual

This obviously wasn’t very insightful to me, except avoiding dreaded button number 4. After wasting more time randomly pressing buttons and pacing my apartment furiously trying to figure out whether I should drink an Asahi or a Budweiser, I settled on Bud. After drinking the beer came an epiphany, or perhaps it was a moment of realization of my own grand idiocy. I hadn’t unhooked the drainage hose from the side of the machine and lead it into the drain. I quickly did this, and the machine breathed a great sigh of relief, as if the burdens of the world had been lifted from it’s shoddily manufactured shoulders. The water drained, the clothes were rinsed, and once again I wondered, is there any problem that an iced cold brew can’t solve?

Filed under: dragons