So I was (still kinda am) pissed off, thinking about things to organize...and I decided to follow through with one of the original "to-do's" of today. I would wash my pants. No no, you don't understand the sheer grungitude that are my pants. Since I have been here, I have washed them maybe, MAYBE 6 times. I mean all of them as a whole. But considering I only have 12-15 pairs, you can be properly disturbed now.

So anyway, these bitches needed a washing. I put the first load in, wrote the last entry, put the first load in to dry, then threw in the second load to wash.

But now began the Lifetime channel special.

I tried to put in a few quarters to the dryer. They kept coming back. Even more pissed and unreasonable than before, I pushed one in..and it disappeared without the usual clink. One, two, three more went like this. I even put in a dime to see if the machine was smoking crack. It was, but not the dime-bag kind (heh, I kill me--but perhaps not before you do).

And thus came to pass the uncoinable Maytag commercial dryer. I thought about just putting my wet clothes from the 2nd load into a bag, waiting until tomorrow, and telling management about it. But then suddenly I got overtaken by that bug of American ingenuity: sheer persistence mixed with the most pig-headed stubborness imaginable. I ran upstairs to the 1st floor and grabbed my sleek nail file (weighing in at 1/32 or 1/64 of an inch, maybe less).

And I proceeded to get MacGyver on that dryer. What I basically tried to do was fish out the coins through the open mouthed coin feeder. Any of you who've tried to do this might think me fucking nuts. Well, no, but I was mindlessly committed.

I stuck in, scrapped, pushed, levered, and jiggled that rough file within the dark confines of the dryer's coin bowels. Through unspeakable chasms and loopy metal things, I probed and pushed and pulled. My dime was the easy one. Getting the next few quarters was a bitch, since I hadn't gotten down The Technique. But by the end of the second quarter--which took roughly 30 minutes--I had discovered The Technique. I had an hawaiian punch to celebrate.

Levering a given quarter UP, instead of pulling on the fucker like it was a nipple, I discovered you had to push it out of some crevice BEFORE pull-jiggle-scrap-scrap-pull-jiggle-forefinger and thumb pull. That netted me my third quarter. The 4th quarter went quick, sinking down into the rolly sideways change scoop thingy. My troubles were nearly at an end. I had another hawaiian punch to celebrate. (that's 1/5th of an average American's caloric intake. Yes, and Clay Aiken's ashram mentor was Theodore Bundy).

And yet, inside that tiny coin hole, with a strained and blurred eye, I could see the original cause of it all: the unknown quarter. Maytag Dryer had tried to swallow the thing, only to become confused somehow. I'd gotten up everything else of mine, so there wasn't a chance in hell I was stopping now. This last quarter took awhile, lots of pull-scrapping. But then, with some levering-pushing of the back end of the nail file, I heard the coin sail home and sink into the great coin boneyard within the belly of the Maytag beast.

I instantly thought: "I am fucking awesome". And no, not accompanied by the MacGyver theme. No no, the A-Team theme. I put in my second load, took up my first, and decided to share this odd tale with you all.

And in conclusion, my second load rumbles dry as we speak--so to speak.

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