May 16, 2003
PSA: don't put stuff in dryer
Y'know, I genuinely thought that this was public knowledge, but apparently not; so here is a PSA for all the readers of this, er, publication.
No matter how helpful you think you're being, you are doing no favours for anyone if you transfer someone else's wet laundry into the dryer and turn it on.
Sure, most things these days can be dried, and most people have a lot of clothes that could just be dumped in the dryer. But there are plenty of things that need to be dried flat, even if they can be washed in the washing machine. By helpfully transferring stuff into the dryer, you could very well be destroying something that cost quite a bit of money---or worse, hours of time, if it was hand-made.
I would be less surprised if a guy didn't know this, because most men's clothing these days is machine-dry-able, but virtually all the women I know have at least some clothes that need to be dried flat.
As it happens, I was pretty lucky to discover this the way I did: I was just washing a swatch of fabric, so there was no great loss. (The idea is that you knit a swatch to figure out how big your stitches are---so you know what size pattern to use---and then wash and dry it as appropriate to see what the final post-wash size of the swatch is. The swatch is not itself inherently useful, so all I lost was the post-wash measurement.) I could have discovered that my housemate didn't know not to dry things by actually losing pieces of clothing, and I'm pretty durn glad that didn't happen.
"You should only need comments when there is some kind of kludge you
need to warn readers about, just as on a road there are only arrows on
parts with unexpectedly sharp curves." --Paul Graham
Posted
by blahedo
at 11:30am
on 16 May 2003
