Not only have I chosen a washing machine (ItÂ’s a Siemens if youÂ’re interested. As time is limited I will allow you to make you own Siemens joke), I even managed to install it on my own today. I am always very proud of myself when I achieve anything that remotely involves working with my hands and tools in a manly way (again, limited time. Make your own wisecrack. I suggest you go for the pun option for both these gags. It is easy, but efficient).
IÂ’m not claiming that installing a washing machine is difficult, well not for the average man, but I am so useless at anything manual like this that I usually get flustered and fuck it all up, with unhilarious and annoying consequences. I am a man who is proud to have an assembled an IKEA kitchen chair on only the third attempt. If there is ever a nuclear apocalypse and I survive the initial explosion, I will be of no use to the renegade society that develops in the aftermath. In fact I will be dead in twelve hours because of my inability to construct anything of any use.
I had had the option of paying a man £15 to put the machine in for me, but I thought “how hard can it be?”
It was harder than I imagined and took about an hour of my day and I was wishing within five minutes that IÂ’d just paid the bloke and be done with it.
Not because connecting up a washing machine in itself is that difficult. You do have to use a spanner to remove three bolts (which I did in the wrong order I realises when I read the instruction book) and then connect a hose to the water pipe and another one to the drains to let the water out. All this would have taken even me only 15 minutes. The washing machine situation was particularly impressive as the pipe was too big to fit through the hole under the sink so I needed to get a small saw (which I had to buy, I didnÂ’t own such an item. What would be the point? I had never had any use for it.) and increase the dimensions of the aperture so the nozzle could fit through. It wasnÂ’t a pretty job and a couple of times I nearly sawed through a flex that was connected to the live electricity supply, but when I was done there was enough space to feed the piping through.
Then I managed to attach it to the water pipe all by myself, and did so so efficiently that even today, after almost 4 uses of the machine, it is still in place.
Perhaps it was wrong that I left my utility room feeling proud and somewhat ruggedly masculine. It was certainly a shame there was no lady there to observe the sweat of hard work and my dirty workmanÂ’s hands, who I could then throw on to the bed and make hard and fast tradesman style love. But given that most of my day is spent arranging words on a piece of paper so that they form nonsensical sentences, this did feel like an actual physical achievement.
More importantly I am now able to get the shit out of my clothes.
