Washing machine in the wild

This is the dial for the washing machine in my apartment. As you can see, it's a little more complex than the washing machines in the dorms. The first annoying thing about this washing machine does not really come through in a picture, you have to be here to experience it yourself. There is a black dial in the middle of that large circle, and surrounding the dial is a plastic circle thing with a red line that
points at whatever setting you want it to. To set the machine, you have to rotate the plastic thing. Maybe this is just a consequence of the machine being old, but it took me about five loads of laundry before I could set the plastic thing in the right place on the first try... or move it at all, for that matter. You have to push it in, wiggle it around a bit, and press hard while turning - slowly, I might add,
because the plastic thing does not move backwards. If you pass your desired setting, around you go for another spin.

Once you have set the machine, you pull on the black dial to start filling the machine with water. At least, that's how it's supposed to happen. What usually happens to me is I start turning the plastic thing and the machine starts filling right away. This is easily fixed by turning the machine back off and setting it again, but does it need to happen at all? No. Again, maybe the machine is just old... but maybe the controls for the setting and starting should not be so intrinsically linked to each other.

The second annoying thing I did not notice until my roommate moved in a couple of weeks ago. He needed to do a load of laundry, but had to ask me five minutes of questions before feeling confident enough that he could work the machine on his own. There are labels of types of wash around the Big Circle, and obviously those correspond to the types of garments you desire to wash, but what of the numbers on the side? How does a 10 wash on Permanent Press differ from a 6 wash, or the unmarked line in between them? What about the long stretches of white on every quadrant of the Big Circle? And let us not mention the mysterious Super Wash 2 off on the bottom left, going against all conventions of numbering on the rest of the circle.

My roommate and I are each fairly intelligent people, high-quality students at a top-notch university... yet here we are, stumped by a washing machine. Or maybe that's not the way to look at it. Maybe the washing machine is simply setting us up for failure.

- Diane Panagiotopoulos