I need Yoshimi to help defend my laundry

The Future Dryer at my parents’ Jetsons house is like a laundry robot. I’ve seen these Future Machines on commercials and in demos at Sears over the last few years and it’s intriguing the things they can do nowadays. There’s steam baths and cold water ionic sanitizing with silver particles and I think if you tip the sales guy, the washers give you a happy ending.

The Whirlpool dryer at my parents’ house, which appeared sometime last spring, is a most curious thing. It thinks on its own, forms opinions, and uses those opinions to decide it can do something totally different than what you told it to. I wish I had a line to the holy ghost of Isaac Asimov to see what I should do about this. The dryer senses how wet your laundry is, and adjusts its drying game plan accordingly throughout the process. You can say you have “super delicate” clothes that need to be “more dry” on the “ultra low heat” setting and it says “okay that’s cool it will take 35 minutes.” Well, it doesn’t really talk, not like Rosie the robot, but there’s a digital number that you agree to when you press the start button. And then it starts “sensing.” And somewhere in those 35 minutes the dryer says to itself “oh this is totally not going to happen in 35 minutes, we are still like 40% dampness in here guys” and changes the display to 51 minutes before your very eyes. I say this because I tend to stare at the machine for most of the cycle to see what it will do next.

The Future Dryer is the most captivating appliance in the house, but not the only one that’s gotten to feel smarter than me since I got here (and I know it does). The night I first got here a couple weeks ago, my parents were still in Minnesota and I had the run of the place on my own. It’s probably for the best, because at least when the robots judge me they can’t talk about it – yet. I spent several minutes in the hallway staring down the thermostat and trying to figure out if it was trying to communicate with me. Really. The thing is, I would walk past it, and it would light up. It’s a blue LED screen with a digital rundown of the thermostatus (a word I just made up, I hope), that I thought was maybe motion sensitive. Perhaps it was saying, “you know, I’m right here, if you’d maybe like it a little cooler than this. Just checking.” The sad thing is, I lived here for a year, some time ago, and I once had a grasp on the Future Thermostat. But I gazed at it wide-eyed and perplexed for quite a while before I figured out it just lights up whenever anything changes, and that I was setting it off by opening and closing the front door a dozen times.

Honestly, my parents’ house isn’t really a Jetsons house. It is three years old, that’s it. Compared to a house that was built this year, it’s probably outdated. But for me, having a microwave that turns into a convection oven or a gas-electric hybrid Prius-like cooking range is jaw-dropping. My last apartment was about a hundred years old, and the appliances were all at least as old as me. I don’t know how to work a thermostat anymore because I’m used to the ancient gas furnace with a dial that I can’t read and a crack in the front glass (that’s safe, right?) that had two settings, in my opinion – “hot with flames” and “it’s cold why can’t I see fire?” I maybe used the oven three times in the year I lived there because it was a gas oven, and gas ovens suck a lot. I did my laundry around the corner at a place where the dryer had two settings on the dial and there was a wood-paneled t.v. set in the corner with vestigial rabbit ears, propped up on a box on one of the folding tables. I wonder, when the Maytag guy was installing those washers and dryers in the 1960’s, if he could see the future George and Jane and Judy and Elroy enjoyed ever becoming a reality.

As crazy as it sounds, I miss my old apartment. When I speak of it reverently, I call it a shitbox. Other times I’m less kind, more honest. There were days I got stuck in my bedroom because the inside of the door never had a knob. Since the door hung crooked, a gust of wind could suck it closed and jam it in the frame. The gas leak that persisted the last few months I lived there was repeatedly a pain in the ass. And I’m still suspicious that the attic was haunted by the 94-year old woman who lived there for 50 years before she died.

But there was a sense of connection there that was unique and inimitable. Last year when I was reading The Jungle in my tiny bedroom I could imagine cold and weary Chicagoans hiding from the wind in that room a century ago, or opening the same window for a summer breeze when it got so hot out that people were collapsing in the streets. I miss doing laundry and catching up on my telenovelas at the same time, while wondering how that teeny tiny hipster is going to fit in those teeny tiny jeans he just folded. Laundromat people are irritating, and always fighting with their children about something. But when one of your neighbors holds the door while you carry your things out into the street and hands you the sock you dropped, you feel a part of a community. There was no hiding from the people who lived next to me, or across the alley from me, or in the same room as me generations ago. Maybe at times I wanted to, but if it comes down to choosing that or being isolated in a bubble helmet and arguing with the sassy robots that do my household chores, I’m not sure the Future is for me.