My Daewoo - 2005

The posts today are all girltalk. Guys, you can learn a little about what it's like to be a housewife, at least in Russia. This first posting is from July 12, 2005 and is about a traumatic experience I had with my Korean washing machine, "My Daewoo."


Let me begin by saying that it was not the machine's fault. As I tell my story, see if you can tell where I went wrong. At one point it will become obvious.

In Ekaterinburg we have what Russians call a three-room flat. We have a living room, a nicely renovated kitchen, and two bedrooms. During the five years I've been away, this has been Slava's bachelor quarters on his lengthy business trips. He spends most of his time at the office, coming to the flat for a quick meal and sleep. Housework has not been high on his list of things to do.

From time to time Slava has hired someone to come in and clean. In preparation for my arrival, he had Nina Vasilovna from his office scour the place from top to bottom. Nina Vasilovna even brought her own houseplants to friendly up the place.

I will interrupt my story with a slight digression into an explanation of Russian names. The formal way of addressing someone is by their first name and patronymic -- in this case, "Nina, daughter of Vasil." It would be presumptuous of me to call her in an intimate way by her first name only. I don't know her last name, and that doesn't happen to be important in this case. To address her properly I have to call her Nina Vasilovna. Slava, by the way, is known to most people here as Sviatoslav Anatolyevich, "Sviatoslav, son of Anatoly."

Well, Nina Vasilovna did a nice job with the windows and the floors and such, but there were some things I knew that she hadn't done. When I used the vacuum cleaner, for instance, it had an asthmatic wheeze. The dust bag had been emptied, so the suction problem was elsewhere. The air filter protecting the motor was totally clogged. I removed it, washed it, and then it was fine.

Slava had lived lightly in the kitchen, and had probably not touched much in the way of supplies. I threw out five-year-old spices and boxed goods way beyond their expiration date. There were suspect cans, as well. And the freezer contained some interesting remains. After five years freezer burn turns frozen spinach into a product like spongy algae.

Some things looked okay. I have done nutritional experiments with dry goods like pasta and dried beans. That is, I've cooked them up for supper, with no resulting tummy troubles.

I moved on to do some washing of clothes, and looked suspiciously at the bathroom floor mat. Slava had washed his own clothes, so Nina Vasilovna hadn't had to use the washing machine. I asked Slava when was the last time that the floor mat had been washed, and he answered vaguely. So the mat went into my Daewoo along with some towels and a sweatshirt of Slava's.

The Daewoo washing machine has a character all its own. It gives me an extensive list of choices for each cycle. For instance, if I want hypothetically to throw one of Slava's business suits in, I can choose "suit." Another choice is "green." Since I've lost the instruction book, I can only assume that it is an energy conservation choice; still, I hesitate to choose that for white sheets…

The Daewoo has a cycle called "night." Maybe it spins real, real quietly then -- I don't know; I've never tried that one. The cycle that I use most is called "fuzzy." It amuses me to do so, because I don't think the Korean manufacturer understood the usual meaning of this word in English. When I trust my clothes to the fuzzy cycle, what I am doing is engaging the sequence that uses "fuzzy logic," adapting to the load that I put in. I think it chooses the water level based on the weight of the load. And as it turns out, I have a philosophical difference with my machine. After it has chosen a very conservative amount of water, I always over-ride to select the next notch higher.

Well, the Daewoo had my towels and the bath mat and Slava's sweatshirt. They sloshed around together for a while, then went into spin. Trouble happened.

The bath mat is more than five years old. Ten, maybe. And the rubber backing disintegrated all at once into thousands of little rubber balls. The resulting mess clogged the drainpipe of my Daewoo.

The obvious first task was to bail out the machine. When it was empty I tried to figure out how to take it apart to clean it. I decided instead on a homeopathic remedy -- a little bit of what ailed it -- that is, more water. The results were encouraging. It belched up lots of little rubber balls, and I bailed them out with the water. I repeated this step so many times that my Daewoo finally used its fuzzy logic to figure out that it might as well give me all it had.

My Daewoo is now working perfectly fine. I shook the towels to remove the little rubber balls that clung to them. I did the best I could with Slava's sweatshirt. He may, however, find a few little rubber balls as a reminder of this time nestled in the fleece fabric when he puts the sweatshirt on next winter.