How to Stop Your Clothes From Smelling of Vaginas, Bum Cracks, and Testicles
You don’t think this applies to you, huh?
One morning, I had just sat down in my home office, after taking a thorough shower and donning clean clothes, when I smelled something odd. It smelled worse than someone who had not washed for a few days, or even a few weeks. Could it be me?
I went to Cindy, who was in the kitchen, and asked her to smell me. This is something I do from time to time. She’s exclaimed, “You smell like an old man’s bum crack!” Cindy couldn’t explain how she knew what an old man’s bum crack smells like. Nevertheless, I assumed that it was a bad thing.
I took all of my clothes off and smelled them carefully. I found that the groin area of my pants (we call them trousers where I come from) smelled like the unwashed testicles of a geriatric bullmastiff. “How could a clean pair of pants smell like this?” I wondered. Well, it turns out that there are many possible reasons, so let’s begin.
First of all, we recently moved into a brand-new apartment building, a building in which every apartment came equipped with an identical and new top-loading washing machine. Like everyone else living in these apartments, we soon discovered that these machines don’t actually work, if by “working” we mean washing clothes.
The drum fills with so little water, so delicately, that the “wash” cycle begins with most of the clothes floating above the water-line, like an upside-down iceberg that’s been dusted with washing powder. Next, the agitator rotates, with tiny alternating movements, as a beloved grandmother dancing like nobody is watching. It’s as if the machine’s inventors were attempting to model how a human washes clothes, but a human wearing a straight-jacket. This machine’s agitator is well named, but mostly for its effect on me.
As with the British Imperial System (inches, feet, and pounds), I’m not sure why top-loading washing machines still exist. I’m even more confused that they seem to be predominantly cherished in the USA, which leads the developed world. The rest of Planet Earth seems to have discovered long ago that by orienting the rotational axis of the drum so that it’s parallel to the surface of the Earth, gravity can be…
