Suds Explosion

It’s really a shame I don’t have any photos for this story, so I guess I’ll have to do my best describing the whole horrible ordeal.

There’s a coin operated laundry facility near the dinghy dock, and they also have a service where you can just leave your laundry and pay the ladies there to do it for you. This is what I did almost every time, because even though I haven’t worked in years I still somehow convince myself that my time is still quite valuable. One day I bucked the norm and decided to wash our salon cushion covers myself, because for some reason I had this idea that I could do a better job. After running them once through a wash cycle, they were still pretty dirty, and I remembered that in New Zealand I spot treated them with detergent and that seemed to work pretty well, so I gave that a try. These were high efficiency front loading machines that warned about using too much detergent, so I tried to compensate for the added detergent used in spot treating by putting less in the cup for the wash cycle. Unfortunately, I misjudged this by an order of magnitude.

When the second cycle was done, all you could see through the door was solid white and when I opened the door (huge mistake!) suds just started to pour out uncontrollably all over the floor. Seriously, it was like something out of a TV show. I was so embarrassed and I had nothing to even attempt to try to clean it up. The Marshallese ladies there were very kind to me about it but of course I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other! They helped me with the cleanup operation, and I told them that from now on I will ask them to do the laundry for me. Sorry, no photos. I was too busy being appalled.