ME! Era: Streamlining Processes

The entire point of my ME! Era is to embrace self-care to alleviate stress. 

I am process driven. I crave simple processes that are either highly efficient (a pill box for the dog) or pleasurably ritualistic (my morning tea). On rare and beautiful occasions, I find a way to create a process that is both (making the bed).  

But my husband hates process. And ritual repetitiveness. And daily routine. I wouldn't call him an agent of chaos necessarily, but the man literally brushes his teeth willy nilly, without observing his toothbrush's vibration pattern which clearly alters when you're meant to change to the next quadrant. 

He also wets the toothbrush before and after the toothpaste: what even is that? 

No, stay on target. Inefficiency that is inconvenient and unpleasurable stresses me out. That's the point. Which brings me to laundry. 

I have always hated laundry. I hate laundry in this house more than in a washateria. 

Why? 

My washer and dryer were installed by our movers in the order the builders installed the wall connections: the dryer on the left, the washer on the right. For 12 years, every time I have done laundry, I have asked myself, "Why?" 

Logically, you start on the left and move to the right. You read and write from left to right: it's the natural order of the Western world. Which begs the question: why is the dryer on the left? The motion becomes backwards: moving wet items from the right into the dryer on the left. It's definitely not Sparta: this is MADNESS. 

And not only is that completely ass-backwards, but my washer and dryer are both front loading, so the doors open to either the left or right, not from the top. The dryer sits on the left, and its door opens to the right, while the washer sits on the right with a door that opens to the left. If you can't picture this, it means the doors open up into one another and create a double-sided wall between them. 

What does that mean? 

It means you can't just pull things out of the washer and pass them immediately into the dryer when you sit in the middle. There's a door wall there. So, the wet laundry is loaded into a basket, maneuvered to the other side and then loaded into the dryer. 

12 years of this idiocy. Apparently, I have the patience of a saint. 

But I hate it. I've always hated it. It's inefficient. It's ludicrous. I'm done. So this morning I did what anyone at the end of their rope would do: I tried to see if I could mount the doors on the opposite side of each machine, so the dryer would open to the left and the washer would open to the right, thereby allowing me to pass the wet laundry (backwards) from right to left, directly into the dryer sans basket. But no, the door mounting mechanisms are not mirrored on each side. You can't just pop them off, rotate them, and screw them on the opposite side of the opening. (Manufacturers: you should consider making this a thing.)  

But I am not Miranda Priestly, and when it comes to this house there can never just be Plan A. I am so used to things just fighting me every step of the way that I always have a Plan B and even a Plan C for the inevitable inconsistencies. Today, we had to execute Plan B: swap the appliances.  

What this meant on the back end: the washer lines would be crossed, and the dryer tube would be stretched and crossed over the washer lines and pulled behind the washer, but it was doable. It probably looks weird from behind, but the wall really doesn't care, and my superpower is controlling the muscles in my eyes, not X-Ray vision: I can't see it, so it doesn't bother me. 

So I endeavored to move them.  

Yeah. They were heavy. And no, my husband did not help me because he didn't think it was necessary, and my husband refuses to have a hand in anything he considers unnecessary. But that's fine: I grew up in a single-mother household frequently interrupted by stints living with my grandparents and an uncle, so I am built on self-reliance and doing things on my own. 

And now I'm doing laundry and the way it is so fast and easy to open the washer and the dryer and just move the clothes from the left to the right from my position in the middle in a quick, fluid motion is such a relief.  Even more important: my husband did a load right after I swapped them and commented that it made much more sense to operate this way, his version of saying, "You were right and I don't know why I ever doubted you."

I now have one less inefficient process to stress me out, and I am one step closer to achieving inner peace. Maybe.