Run-in at the laundromat

You guessed it - it's time for another episode of:
THOSE CRAZY AMERICANS!

So, just like someone who's never been inside an Austrian laundromat, I pulled my big bag of dirties into the place and headed for an open washing machine. There are coin slots clearly visible, and it's a self-serve laundromat, right? The manager (whom I'd mistaken for just another customer) immediately knew that she was dealing with a Dummkopf. First she reprimands me for not saying hello (I had gotten used to letting the other person initiate a greeting, since it's not expected in all situations here!), and then she tells me that I have to weigh my dirty clothes on the scale.

"Of course!" you all are thinking. "Why would anyone forget to weigh their clothes on the scale when they enter a laundromat!"

Well, if you had been there to give me advice, I would gladly have taken it, rather than continue to be a source of aggravation to the manager. Anyway, I duly weighed my load (7 kilos - for those of you who don't know metric, that's 41.608 / root 7.3 pounds). Then she told me I could squeeze it into a 6-kilo washer - fine, that's my style anyway - and that it'd cost 10 euros. (I'll give you the simple calculation for that one - 10 euros is $13.90. That seems a lot of cash for one stinking load of wash and dry.) But I had read in the guidebooks that it cost a lot in Vienna, so I paid her.

Then she led me to the machine and showed me how to get started, and which tokens go in which slot (just like at Chuck E. Cheese's, you can't put real coins in the machines, you have to trade in your money for weird play-coins here), and she gave me a cup of detergent. I was so grateful for her now-freely-offered help that I didn't mention that I'd brought my own detergent.

I settled down with my computer and did some reading and writing while the clothes did some sudsing and swimming. And then what? Of course, I managed to screw things up again.

My logic was impeccable. We had put three gold tokens into the washer, and since I had two silver tokens left, I would have to put them both into the dryer to start it. Right? Here's where my logic came crashing down (which seems to happen all the time...) Insert wet clothes, insert two silver coins - voila! one half-rotation, and then the dryer stops. I gently tap the machine when she's not looking, and it's still stopped. So I go over and interrupt her work to say timidly that "Ich habe die zwei geputzt, aber es geht nichts." (I didn't, and still don't, know the German word for play-money token, so I just left the noun out of the sentence entirely.) She understood perfectly though - "Zwei?!?! Du solltest nur eins benutzen!!!"

Those crazy Americans! So I had to buy another two silver tokens from her (fortunately, these only cost 1 euro for the pair - BTW, how can washing cost 9 and drying only cost 1? Does that surprise anyone else?) - and here's the real surprise: do you know how the machines we use in America are sometimes called "spin dryers"? Well, here in this Viennese laundromat, there's one machine that spins, and another one that dries with heat, and you must use both. She came over to correct me after I loaded the spinner improperly ("No, no, not like that, like this! Can't you read?" - as she points to the 5 or 6 lines of directions printed on the machine. I swear to you that's what she said, though I would have thought that by this point, she would actually expect that my reading abilities would be limited, which they are.)

Well - at least this story has a happy ending. I put in the requisite single token for the spinner, and it did its thing; I transferred the clothes to the heat-dryer, and it did its thing; I put the cleanies in my big bag and left, being sure to initiate a pleasant goodbye this time - "Danke schön!" (Many thanks!)

"Bitte, auf wiedersehen!" came the reply. ("Sure thing, see you next time!") If the owner had been rolling her eyes or less-than-genuine at this point, I would have imagined her thinking "What a dummkopf - but I'll still take his money." But that's not the impression I was left with. She may have been, at all stages of the procedure, unable to believe that I had not walked in the door already knowing the intimacies of Austrian-laundromat customs and machinery; she may have spoken impatiently a few times; but she did offer me plenty of help, and I think she knows that if I come back I'll remember exactly what to do. So I take her last remark as it sounds - see you next time. And I like the sound of that.