Me Vs. The Washing Machine

My aunt came round unexpectedly with her partner Derek, once on Friday and again on Sunday. This tested my ability to cope with having guests while alone, but specifically it was a test of my cooking. After frantically rummaging in the cupboard for something passable as not student food, I found a jar of Homepride bacon and cheese pasta sauce.

I was expecting the preparation of it to be rather simple - "Pour over pasta, eat" - but it was a surprising new approach to cooking pasta that I didn't trust at all. The procedure entailed putting a large amount of raw, hard pasta in a bowl, smothering it in sauce, adding cold water so that it was a yellow watery mess, sticking it in the oven and hoping for the best. Things were looking desperate at half an hour in to the cooking time because it still resembled cheese, bacon and noodle soup, but grating cheese in to it as per the instructions seemed to solidify it a bit. I wouldn't say that the end result was of much quality, but it seemed to do the job. Unfortunately our conversation was mostly about gas, as they run a heating company and were going around the Northeast of Scotland giving safety checks to old-age pensioners.

Another appliance that I've had difficulty with is the washing machine. I thought laundry was dead easy in St Andrews - you went down to the room, waited half an hour for a non-broken machine to be free, remembered you'd forgotten to take washing powder, scraped the spilled bits from around the edges of the other machines and spooned the residue in to your own, then pressed "Wash these" (there were six choices, but I only ever bothered with one because it worked the first time) and your clothes would come out clean, or if not that, wet. Drying was a similar procedure - you paid to have your clothes rotated round for an hour or so with very few side effects (including any obvious drying).

I was expecting the one at home to be similar, but the thing looks like something left over from Apollo 11, and most of my time in the utility room was spent screaming "What?!" at it hysterically. The first hint that something was amiss was when I had to tug on an entwined bag to open the drawer, the handle having fallen off some years ago. I put a random amount of powder in to a randomly chosen compartment, shut it, and turned my attention to the dial on the right. This was composed of about twenty letters around the inner edge, which with a bit of force could be rotated to match up with a series of indecipherable heiroglyphics around the outside. After some experimentation, it emerged that a humming sound was produced when I pulled the dial outwards, and I assumed that indicated that it was doing at least something.

I had to pretty much guess what to do - it's like playing Russian Roulette with your washing machine - and I spun the letter "G" to the top, as in "Wash these, you infernal contraption". Actually, now that I look at it, there isn't a G in that at all. Maybe I chose badly.