Jen vs. the washing machine

It has been confirmed. I am a lazy [read: asshole] American.

I've moved into my apartment--which, by all respects, is very nice. I slept reasonably well last night, considering the noises the AC was making and the fact that the sheets didn't fit the bed and barely covered me. This morning my gigantic piece of luggage arrived via courier--they'll carry anything for you in this country! It was actually kind of fun unpacking the monster luggage because I had forgotten that I had packed half that shit. I was so excited when I found not one, but two tank tops!

The manager at my school ran through the instructions of the washing machine yesterday, but I wasn't paying as much attention as I probably should have been, especially considering that the knobs are labeled in kanji. This morning, the only thing I remembered was that the knob with the numbers controls the time and the slide knob in the middle was to be ignored.

My washing machine was not designed with the lazy American in mind. First you've got to actually turn on the water and wait for the level to raise enough to cover the clothes. This took an incredibly long amount of time as the water was basically just trickling into the machine. I found out that it's best to wait for the machine to be full of water before you turn on the timer because it's probably not very good for the clothes to be batted around by the paddle when they're basically dry.

After the time had run, I opened the machine [whose top just comes right off because it's got nothing but gravity keeping it on] and had to fiddle with the other knobs to figure out how to drain the water. Once the water is drained, you've got to put the sopping wet clothes into the other side, which does the spin cycle. During the spin cycle the entire machine jumped and lunged forward and made godawful noises. I didn't think much of this, and just figured that the reason that the machine is sitting in a plastic tray with sides is so that it doesn't jump all over the kitchen and knock something over. I kept thinking of the washer races I had seen somewhere on TV...

For some reason, and I'm going to blame it on the fact that I was doing this very early in the morning, it didn't occur to me until it had finished the spin cycle that I was just spinning the soapy clothes and not rinsing them off. The manager made absolutely no mention of this little bit of helpful advice.

Once I started ignoring the manager's advice and just hitting whatever button I thought looked good at the time, including the slide knob in the middle [which, it turns out, controls which part of the machine the water goes into], the laundry went really well. Important lesson of the day: Ignore Japanese instructions.