Evan's All Washed Up

There are three things that Evan does in the house. He watches the TV shows stored on my server, he makes toast and he washes his clothes. Now these seem like normal things, but this is all he does and he does these things a lot!

I'm not sure how many clothes one person can wear in one week. I generally wear the same jeans for most of the week and I change my T-shirt once a day plus my work shirt once a day. This doesn't make a lot of clothes so I use the washing machine about once a week. Even must be moonlighting as a male model or something cause he seems to need to do at least three loads of washing per week. Maybe he just loves a good wardrobe change every hour. I'm not quite sure.

We have a nice big backyard too with a clothes line in it. This is a bit too passé for our Evan however. He likes to keep an eye on his wet underpants and so everything gets dried on a drying rack he keeps in the dining room. Nothing makes my muesli more appetising first thing in the morning that the sight of Evan's damp knickers.

I've left subtle hints about this, like moving the whole thing into the laundry, or even leaving it in his room, but it just comes back like an annoying case of herpes. And it's not just that he dries stuff there, but that he leaves it there for well over a week after it has dried! Even when I moved the rack into his room he just left the clothes on it. His room isn't that big, the rack would have been so annoyingly in the way that a normal person would have just done something about it. But for a week after it just sat there in his room! You'd think that not being able to walk into your room properly would encourage you to put your undies away, but not for our Evan. Who says pot smoking lowers your productivity?

So while his washing is hanging out in the kitchen, Evan likes to make toast and use my projector to watch episode after episode of downloaded TV series. The collection I have is quite large so one could easily spend day after day going through it without pause. This suits Evan just fine. You'll often find him passed out on the couch with the projector still running and some show just mindlessly blurting away at him. He leaves his crumbs and plates in the kitchen for the cockroaches and the washing up fairies to play with while his undies gradually fossilise awaiting the joy of once again being wrapped about his nether regions. (urrrrrrh, image...)

So I decided that since I own the washing machine, the toaster and the router he had no right to use them. I also own the fridge, but I haven’t quite figured out what to do about that one yet.. maybe later. As for the other stuff, easy. I hardly use the toaster, it’s handy, but I can go without it for a fortnight. That was easy, I just hid it. The router was also pretty simple. I did the router in stages to see what would happen. First I disconnected him from the Internet while leaving him connected to the router. I liked this method because it meant that his IPhone would connect to the router first but get no signal. Otherwise it would just go straight to mobile mode. But I discovered that it still gave him access to my file server. This was no good. So I just changed the password.

Evan was in his room at the time as I soon discovered. Within about 30 seconds of changing the password I hear him come out of his room. We hadn’t spoken since our convo through the door, so he wasn’t about to ask for my help with it. Usually when the router stops talking you have to unplug it for 10 seconds and it’s good to go. I reckon Evan thought that this was a normal outage, but wasn’t about to try and fix it as I was sitting in the office. With no means available to make himself toast, he decided it would be a good time to do a load of washing.

It should be noted here that Evan’s last load of washing was still drying in the kitchen - actually, it was well dried by now and at the time of writing this is still sitting there. Out he comes with a new basket of soon to be forgotten Long Johns and dumps it in the machine. I’m doing my best at this point to just listen in and not laugh at him. He fills the machine and pours in his powder. Dial turn, Click, Nothing. Turn, Turn, Click, Nothing. Unplug, change points, Click, Nothing. Lid goes up, Lid goes down, Nothing.

What Evan doesn't know is that the washing machine is now missing a few vital components. I disconnected the main power line from the circuit board, and just to be safe I removed a rather large capacitor from inside the unit. I'm not quite sure what function this little baby performs, but I'm fairly certain it's vital to the happiness of a washing machine.

 He can’t ask me about it even though I’m only 3 metres away. I slunk off into my room to “do something” which involved point and whispering to my girlfriend about the hi Jinx in the other room. OK, yes I’m being callous here, but there are only so many pairs of wet undies a man can take before he gets a bit postal.

Eventually Evan left the laundry situation and went back to his room to get ready for work. I sauntered over to the machine to check out his handy work and found the machine full of his washing and powder. He’d changed all the water settings, moved the plug and then just left it with the lid open.

After Evan went to work I took out his clothes and put mine in. My girlfriend wouldn't let me touch her till I'd scrubbed his dirty underwear off my hands with solvo. She watched me lather up and everything! I hung my stuff out and put Evan's clothes back in the machine and left it open as he had left it.

The next day we had builders in to fix a window. I asked them when I got home if my flatmate had been in. I got a bit of a weird look off them and they explained that he'd been through, tried the machine and left again. Not sure what he'd said to them, but I could tell they knew all was not well in the house. Apparently he'd tried their vacuum cleaner in the wall plugs to determine if there was power going into them. There was, but no washing for poor Evan.

It's been two days now and the machine is still full of his clothes and washing powder. I hope he knows that the stuff is caustic and will eat through fabric if left on them for too long.