How Not to do the Laundry

Here's a helpful tip for those of you who conduct your very own weekly laundry rituals like I do. After adding detergent to the washing machine, it would be in your best interest to place the detergent somewhere other than on the top of the washer.

It turns out that washing machines feature a fascinating event called the "Spin Cycle." And during the spin cycle, the washer can vibrate rather dramatically, and there's an excellent chance that the detergent could come tumbling off the top of the machine.

Our laundry area has a particularly hard floor, made of particularly hard cement. And I have learned that the fine people who manufacture liquid laundry detergent apparently did not spend a lot of time putting their products through crash test simulators.

So the end result is that when your brand new bottle of liquid detergent vibrates off the top of the washing machine, even though this may just be a height of four feet, it can create a very impressive splattering radius throughout the surrounding area. And it is a nasty bugger to clean this stuff up. And you will spend several days smelling extremely "fresh," like a winter breeze, and your hands can become extraordinarily and annoyingly dry to the point where you just want to lick them.

And, when you explain to your significant other that you have wasted a significant amount of detergent in this careless manner, you can fully expect to be the victim of The Look of Doom.