The problem was, it steadfastly refused to go beyond the "get the clothes soaking wet and soap-filled" stage and move on to the "getting rid of the water and soap and leaving your clothes in an only slightly damp wad on the bottom" stage (except for that extra sock that, James Bond-like, clings to the top of the inside so that it can infiltrate the next person's laundry).

I had already tried all of the conventional methods to fix a domestic appliance: talking to it rationally, pleading with it, threatening it, and the usual cure-all — kicking the side repeatedly while using colorful adjectives to describe it. Nothing worked.

I should mention here that I am genetically incapable of dealing successfully with foreign washing machines. Once my parents and I stayed in a campground in Germany. At this point in time, my family's collective German skills extended to cover only such phrases as "yes," "no," "three, and one is child," and "warm showers?"

Finding no one to help in Italian or English, my mother squared her shoulders, marched up to the campground's washing machines, and stared real hard at the German instructions. She found the word "warm" a couple of times, but that wasn't much help as it was not followed by the word for "showers." She finally tossed our clothes into a machine, dumped some dry soap in with them, fed it a couple of Deutschmarks, and pushed a few random buttons. The machine stared to hum and churn, so my mom left it alone to do whatever it wanted to with our clothes, hoping for something along the lines of a warm shower.

What it wanted to do was return our clothes in a very warm, fluffy, soap-filled heap. Considering that the machine she had chosen was a dryer, this was not an unusual thing for it to do. Of course the soap didn't help matters. Neither did I or my father, both of whom hooted with laughter and have never let her forget it. My parents spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get all the soap out of the dryer.

So, ten years later, I took my defective laundry-DNA and faced the problem of getting my clothes clean. I did it with my shoulders squared, my dirty clothes in an ever-mounting pile, and the German word for "warm showers" firmly implanted in my mind. I figured it had now come down to That Moment. This was it, all other options had been exhausted. I would have to consult... the operating manual.

I vaguely recalled watching our landlady, during our tour of the apartment, toss a manual up on to a high shelf in the bathroom to collect dust for us. Luckily, there were a few pages of instructions in English sandwiched in between the Romanian and the Ancient Sumerian sections.

The English section appeared to have been translated from the original Japanese into English by an illiterate blind man who spoke only Swahili. Apparently he was the one who came up with the "small receptacle" idea and added it on his own. I am convinced that the original, Japanese section simply tells you where exactly to kick the machine and which colorful Japanese adjectives to use to make it work again, but this somehow got lost in what I will laughingly refer to as the 'translation.'

The English part had a troubleshooting entry for "Machine draining not effectively," "not effectively" being Swahili for "clothes still dirty, but now soapy and wet, too!" To solve this problem, all I had to do was this: "Remove filter, located in front of bottom left corner, caring to slide safety catch, and rotating in counter-clockwise fashion. Clean filter. Replacing in a clockwise fashion."

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