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Laundry
Hello again, my dears. I do apologize for my recent absence. Business ventures have been taking up much of my time and focus. Just recently I was complaining at breakfast about my inability to focus on my writing lately. This prompted much conversation on how I could motivate myself, all of which pointed to more 'Pleb Life' articles, because who doesn't like watching their boss struggle with mundane tasks? We then moved on to discussing which banal task I was to undertake and one of them suggested laundry.
Can you imagine, dear reader, a person of my station performing such a workaday task? Well, you don't have to imagine it because I am about to relay to you the complete and utter disaster that it was. First of all, I had to discover what laundry actually was. Shaila, who used to be a laundress, tells me that it's the act of washing, drying, and pressing one's clothes. To be quite honest with you, I take my clothes off and leave them on the bench at the foot of my bed and then sometime in the night they disappear. Then, after some time, new clothing looking remarkably the same appears in my closet. I always assumed that my head housekeeper, Mrs. Porter, was doing this by some sort of magic, and it turns out that magic is called laundry.
I enlisted the help of Shaila and Mrs. Porter to assist me in my endeavor to learn the trade. They seemed hesitant at first, but I reminded them that I'm the one who pays them and they suddenly seemed more eager. They started by showing me where they bring the dirty clothing. Now, I assumed that they simply donated them to some charity, or threw them in the trash or something. But no, they bring them down to a large room near the kitchens. My first thought upon entering the room was 'dear gods it's hot in here', which apparently I am told is just something that you have to deal with. Temperature discomfort is, quite frankly, the worst sort of discomfort and I do not deal with it well. So right from the start I was already quite irritated.
Next, I learned how to prepare the clothes. Like, I literally thought that you just threw them in the water, added some soap and voila, clean clothes. Nope. Apparently you need to separate them by color, fabric, and a myriad of other things that were explained to me and I promptly forgot. Different vats were for washing different things and I needed to learn each one. It's honestly quite complicated and boring and not worth explaining here. I mean I could explain it, because I definitely payed attention and know all the things. And I definitely did not have to buy a large portion of my household new garments because I definitely did not ruin theirs due to negligence.
So finally we get to put the clothes in the boiling water (unless of course that particular piece of clothing went in cold water) and do what I was told was the 'fun' part. Spoiler alert, it was not fun. You have to do what's called 'possing', which sounds dirty but really it's quite literally cleaning. You use an item resembling a large plunger and you kind of stir the clothes with it, not unlike when I made meatballs. In fact, much like Sven, Mrs. Porter did a lot of yelling, throwing up her hands, sighing, and some gentle sobbing throughout the whole process. It was quite hard work, and I was sweating and quite miserable about thirty seconds in when I was told that I would need to keep this up for about a half hour. Usually I am quite impressed when someone can keep something up for a half hour that I was expecting to take thirty seconds, but it this case it was highly disappointing.
Once we were done with the possing, we moved on to the wringing. Now, I spend a lot of time wringing my hands, so I thought that it would be quite easy. Besides, there is this fancy contraption that basically wrings the clothes for you. But it turns out, you can only use that machine on some of the garments, as it ruins many fabrics. Also it turns out, that machine is harder to use than it looks. A lot of the finer fabrics need to be wrung by hand. Basically, you take the fabric in your hands and twist and turn it until you get all the moisture out it that you can. Turns out I was rather good at this part. My primary profession lends a lot to hand strength. It's why I am so good at opening stubborn jars.
At this point I thought we were done. Nope. Apparently if you just let the garments dry afterwards they will be a wrinkly mess like Shaila's Aunt Martha (she has a colorful way of describing things). You have to strategically use the steam created by the boiling water from the vats to help with the dewrinkling while drying, which is really quite a pain as the steam also makes the clothing wet again. It's quite a tedious process, really. And then after all of that you have to press the clothing with a small but heavy metal triangle called an iron. You have to have the heat just right or it could ruin certain fabrics. It also has the added bonus of burning off your skin, and it really made me wish that I had been able to keep Aloysius alive so I could juice him for his soothing innards. Oh, and if you leave it on a garment for too long, it can also start a small fire.
I learned a lot in the laundry, but oddly enough not nearly as much about laundry as I learned about other things. Apparently the laundresses like to gossip, a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I learned something about everyone in town that I never knew before, including some things about myself. It was a treasure trove of pertinent information. All of the chatter distracts them from the heat and back breaking labor, I was told, and helped to pass the time.
Honestly it was quite hard work, and it's a wonder that laundresses don't have arms the size of tree trunks for all the work out that they get. I have a new found appreciation for the folks who keep our clothing clean and pressed and now know why people often wear a garment multiple times before laundering it. All of these adventures into the back of the house are quite enlightening and honestly really helpful in business decisions regarding hiring practices and staffing. I don't think I'm going to suddenly quit my day job in favor of manual labor or anything, but I am developing a healthy respect for those who do these jobs. Mostly, I am just happy that other people do them so that I don't have to, so keep up the good work!