Episode 118 • Laundry
Hamper
Wring something out
Line dry
Softener
Bleach
Story
Little sister: Hey, big sister. Whatcha doing?
Monica: Mom asked me to do the laundry.
Little sister: You can’t do the laundry!
Monica: Of course I can! I’m your big sister, remember? I can do anything.
Little sister: You’ve never done the laundry. Mom always does it. I bet you don’t even know where the hamper is.
Monica: Ha ha. Funny. It’s right behind you.
Little sister: What about the washer?
Monica: I know it’s this one.
Little sister: That’s actually the dryer.
Monica: What do you know?
Little sister: Mom told me. Do you even know how to use the dryer?
Monica: I- I don’t need to use it.
Little sister: What? How are you going to dry your clothes then?
Monica: I’m- I’ll just wring them out and then I’ll line dry everything. I saw grandma do it once. I got this, okay? Alright… Alright, now I’ll just add the softener and voilà. See? I told you I could do it. Now we just gotta wait.
[Clock ticking]
Monica: Okay, now we just- Oh, no. Oh, no. What happened to my clothes? Why are they all white and gray?
Little sister: Monica, what does it say here on the bottle? B- bl- blee-
Monica: Just- Give me that! Oh no…
Little sister: What?
Monica: What I put in wasn’t a softener. -[sigh] That was bleach…
Questions
Hamper
'I bet you don’t even know where the hamper is.'
• What do you put in a hamper? Dirty clothes or clean clothes?
The hamper is the place where you put your dirty clothes.
• What do you do with the clothes you put in the hamper? Do you wash them or do you throw them out?
You wash them! Could you imagine? Oh, no, my shirt smells, I need to throw it out and buy a new one! No, no, no. If your shirt smells or it’s dirty, or it's something you put it in the hamper so that when you have collected enough dirty clothes, then you can wash them.
• What does a hamper look like?
Usually a hamper is like a big basket, it’s usually pretty tall so that it can contain a lot of clothes, although not always, and it may or may not have a lid depending on the kind of hamper that you are buying.
• Do you have a hamper in your room? If not, where is it?
I mean, I think everybody has a hamper in their house, but right now, I’m traveling so, although we did bring a lot of stuff with us, we had to make do without a hamper, but back at home, we do have this really cute IKEA basket that we use as a hamper, it probably wasn't meant to be an hamper but that works for us, but right now we don't, we mostly just throw our dirty clothes on the floor and wait for them to pile up so that we can throw them in the washer. I know, I know. It’s not ideal but it works.
Wring something out
'I’ll just wring them out …'
• If you wring something out, what do you do? Do you add water to clothes or do you remove it from them?
If you wring something out, you remove water from wet clothes. So if something is really wet, you wring it out, so that it becomes less wet.
• How do you wring something out? By shaking it or by twisting it?
You wring out clothes by twisting them. So you’ve got one hand on one side of the, say, shirt, and then the other hand on the other side and then you twist it in opposite directions and you can see the water leaving the shirt.
• What else can you wring out?
I guess anything that is wet and soft and that can be twisted, so obviously like we said: clothes, or even like towels, but also your hair. If you got long hair, when you get out of the shower or right before getting another shower you might have to wring it out.
• Do you wring out your clothes after washing them?
Not really, I feel like washers these days do a pretty good job at leaving your clothes pretty dry so I don’t need to wring out my clothes but I must admit, whenever I do, I find it really satisfying, you know, to see all that water come out, but no, I don’t do it very often.
Line dry
'… then I’ll line dry everything. I saw grandma do it once. I got this okay.'
• When line drying your clothes, do you use a machine to dry your clothes or not?
No, you don’t. If you line dry your clothes, that means you probably do not own a dryer and so you cannot rely on a machine to dry your clothes.
• Then what do you use?
Well, if you don’t have a dryer, what you can do is use, which is what I do, a drying rack. So it’s sort of like this structure where you hang your clothes and then just wait for them to get dry. And this process is what we call line drying. I guess we say line drying because really all you need is a clothesline, you know like a rope, you hang your clothes there and just wait, which is what we’ve been doing for centuries before we invented dryers, and obiouvsly by we I mean someone that was much, much smarter than me. I didn't invent dryers.
• Which is more convenient? Line drying your clothes or putting them in a dryer?
So I don’t have a lot of experience with dryers because I’ve never personally owned one. Now, when I lived in the States pretty much every house that I lived in had one and I remember just loving it. Just knowing that you don’t have to wait for hours and hours for your clothes to dry, it’s... It’s something. So, yeah, I think line drying is definitely less convenient. It's a lot more work and especially if you live in a pretty humid or cold house it can take some times, I wanna say days, yes, days for your clothes to dry, so sometimes it's a little annoying.
• Do you line dry your clothes?
Unfortunately I do. It’s one of those chores- Like I don’t mind doing the dishes, I don't mind vacuuming... But line drying, I just. I don’t like it. So I usually just shove everything in the washer and then ask Marcos if he can do the rest. I just- I don’t know. I find it super boring. Especially when you have a bunch of socks inside out because then I have to turn them the right way round (yes, Marcos, I’m talking about your socks). Anyway...
Softener
'Alright, now I’ll just add the softener and voilà.'
• What does softener do? Does it make the clothes softer or does it make them smell better?'
Softener is meant to make your clothes softer but, I guess more often than not, it also makes them smell better, but that isn't its first purpose.
• When are you supposed to add softener? Before washing your clothes or after?
You’re supposed to add in the softener before you wash your clothes. Doing it after won’t do much and doing it while you’re washing your clothes would mean having to open your washer mid-wash, which is defenitely something that I wouldn’t recommend doing.
• Do you add softener when washing your clothes?
I used to never use softener because my mom had this weird theory that softener was bad for you I guess, for some reason, I don’t even remember but then I realized that wasn’t true and so now I do use it, although I don’t think I’m buying a very good brand because it doesn’t do much. In fact whenever I dry my face using one of the towels I washed, it feels like a giant cat is licking my face and if you’ve ever been licked by a cat, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Bleach
'Yeah, I think that wasn’t softener, that was bleach…'
• What is bleach used for? To remove stains from your clothes or to make your clothes softer?
We already said that softener is used to make your clothes softer, but "bleach" is indeed used to remove stains or even to make your clothes, like white clothes, and linen, and stuff like that whiter.
• Can you use bleach with all sorts of clothes? Why or why not?
No, you’re supposed to only use it with white clothes, or white towels, or white stuff in general because obiouvsly bleach removes the color from clothes, that's why it makes so white whiter and it removes stains, so, yeah, not a good idea if you’re trying to wash clothes that aren’t white, trust me.
• Have you ever used bleach to wash your clothes?
I have never used bleach to wash my clothes and now that I think about it, that’s probably why most of my white shirts are either gray or really yellowish. So yeah, maybe I should start using it.
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