I’m ridiculously excited! (I should warn you at this point that this is coming from someone who’s been baking cookies for the cat – it doesn’t take much to excite me these days).  What has got me so excited?  Well, today, I have done three loads of washing in my machine!  (I did try to warn you…)

Almost three weeks ago I came home at 10pm to a house with no power as the machine had decided it had really had enough of the whole cleaning malarkey.  I put a torch in my mouth, climbed on a chair and did that trippy thing with the fuse box while on the phone to Dad, and once we exhausted the possibility of it being a fuse, I decided it was ok, because I’ve paid for an extended warranty for years and it would only be a few days before it was fixed.  Yeah, right.  Over the next 2.5 weeks, this is what happened:

 Dead washing machine day 4:

Engineer 1: ‘The last engineer has left your machine in such a state, all I can do is order EVERY part it is made up of and rebuild it. I can’t fix it now’

Call Centre: ‘We don’t have all the parts.  We’ll send someone out next week’

Dead washing machine day 10:

Call Centre:  ‘You know the engineer who is meant to be turning up in 30 minutes?  Well he’s called in sick.’

Dead washing machine day 14:

Engineer 2: ‘Engineer 1 has ordered the wrong parts’

Me:  ‘How?  He ordered everything!’

Engineer 2: ‘The system only allows you to order 10 parts.  He went over the limit.  And the hose that has arrived is the wrong one.  I can’t fix it now’

 Dead washing machine day 19:

Engineer 2 resurrected the washing machine.  On a Saturday.  Because I got REALLY grumpy with the warranty people but was still nice to him.  HOORAY for engineer 2 and grumpiness!

So the moral of the story is:

Don’t bother with extended warranties – I could have bought a new machine on day 2 with the money I’ve spent on it and saved myself rearranging 3 days of work.

Don’t think that your sister’s idea to thin out your socks and knicker drawer is a good idea and copy her.  It doesn’t allow for breakdowns and results in frantic driving to a very good friends house (you know who you are) to load your smalls in her machine.

Have a really good friend in your back pocket at all times who won’t mind you loading your smalls in her machine and who offers the fantastic service of drying and folding everything and sending you home with cake. (I really owe you!)

Those My Little Pony pants might be the most comfortable you own, but they do take a bit of explaining when someone else folds up all your clothes.

Don’t wash all  your clothes in excitement on a Tuesday if like me you have a yoga class in the evening….tonight’s downward dog is going to be rather damp.  But at least it will be clean :o)