northwesty
Well-known member
Hi gang, here is an article I came across in the June 1955 American Home magazine of mine (I have all the Better Homes and Gardens so I’m branching out) Some is a little over the top but I enjoyed it none-the-less, hope you do too. –Northwesty
Suds in Your IQ by Catherine Christopher
Let others aspire to the day when a home-model Electric Brain will be available. I can wait. The automatic washer we unwittingly allowed on the premises a few years ago is all the cerebral machinery I can cope with. That glistening appliance hailed so joyously as a symbol of triumph over drudgery, is taking a rather stiff psychological toll. I live with the sensation that our relationship-my washer’s and mine-is but an armed truce, that this mechanical Gargantua may one day break the bolts that bind him
These thoughts might have remained blissfully subliminal except for Mr. Krumfort, the man who installed our washer. During the 23 years he has worked with machines, Mr. Krumfort has acquired respect for THEM. He claims communion with them, and listens to the “beating of their hearts.” He is wont to refer to pulse instead of r.p.m. and he takes something from his tool kit that looks suspiciously like a stethoscope to me!
“Machines have souls,” says Mr. Krumfort, “they don’t like to work for people, and that’s a fact.” He deplores man’s persistent folly in making machines more efficient all the time, gives me the uneasy impression that they are just cat-and-mousing it with us human beings, and have already plotted an Industrial Revolution that will roll history back like a moving picture in reverse. Of course, come the Revolution, my washer will probably be carrying the oriflamme.
Ever since Mr. Krumfort got me off on the wrong foot, I have felt like a Simon Legree, a sweatshop operator, exploiting the motor hear and steel muscles and wire arteries of a brooding resentful slave. And subsequent evidences of malicious whimsy on the washer’s part seem to support Mr. Krumfort’s thesis.
A creature of moods, my washer goes to work in girlish merriment as the water gushes merrily in. Then comes the long, weary sigh just before the rinse cycle, and the reluctant shudder that precedes its hysterical spinnings. In the stretches, the water mumbles, whimpers and delivers incantations that sound like damnitall-damnitall-damnitall. Once it had a tantrum, jumped up and down like a basketball guard. How cunningly it contrived to keep between me and the switch!
Furthermore, I have to pamper its digestion. It can’t accommodate just any old soap the way my stupid but faithful agitator wringer washer did for 13 faithful, unquestioning years. This automatic personality requires water softener if I use soap, and will spit out detergents like a naughty child if I fail to measure the amount required with the exactitude of an uncertain mother preparing her baby’s first formula.
Once the washer clattered something fierce, and Mr. Krumfort found a bobby pin in its innards. You’d think I’d put ground glass in my husband’s meatloaf the way Mr. Krumfort went on! Another time, an offbeat clicking worried me and Mr. Krumfort came, all solicitude and reproachfulness. He gave the patient a few reassuring pokes with a screwdriver, then turned it on. It purred contentedly. Mr. Krumfort was sure I’d imagined the symptoms. “There seems to be nothing wrong with it now,” he opined, adding, “Maybe you make it nervous.”
Suds in Your IQ by Catherine Christopher
Let others aspire to the day when a home-model Electric Brain will be available. I can wait. The automatic washer we unwittingly allowed on the premises a few years ago is all the cerebral machinery I can cope with. That glistening appliance hailed so joyously as a symbol of triumph over drudgery, is taking a rather stiff psychological toll. I live with the sensation that our relationship-my washer’s and mine-is but an armed truce, that this mechanical Gargantua may one day break the bolts that bind him
These thoughts might have remained blissfully subliminal except for Mr. Krumfort, the man who installed our washer. During the 23 years he has worked with machines, Mr. Krumfort has acquired respect for THEM. He claims communion with them, and listens to the “beating of their hearts.” He is wont to refer to pulse instead of r.p.m. and he takes something from his tool kit that looks suspiciously like a stethoscope to me!
“Machines have souls,” says Mr. Krumfort, “they don’t like to work for people, and that’s a fact.” He deplores man’s persistent folly in making machines more efficient all the time, gives me the uneasy impression that they are just cat-and-mousing it with us human beings, and have already plotted an Industrial Revolution that will roll history back like a moving picture in reverse. Of course, come the Revolution, my washer will probably be carrying the oriflamme.
Ever since Mr. Krumfort got me off on the wrong foot, I have felt like a Simon Legree, a sweatshop operator, exploiting the motor hear and steel muscles and wire arteries of a brooding resentful slave. And subsequent evidences of malicious whimsy on the washer’s part seem to support Mr. Krumfort’s thesis.
A creature of moods, my washer goes to work in girlish merriment as the water gushes merrily in. Then comes the long, weary sigh just before the rinse cycle, and the reluctant shudder that precedes its hysterical spinnings. In the stretches, the water mumbles, whimpers and delivers incantations that sound like damnitall-damnitall-damnitall. Once it had a tantrum, jumped up and down like a basketball guard. How cunningly it contrived to keep between me and the switch!
Furthermore, I have to pamper its digestion. It can’t accommodate just any old soap the way my stupid but faithful agitator wringer washer did for 13 faithful, unquestioning years. This automatic personality requires water softener if I use soap, and will spit out detergents like a naughty child if I fail to measure the amount required with the exactitude of an uncertain mother preparing her baby’s first formula.
Once the washer clattered something fierce, and Mr. Krumfort found a bobby pin in its innards. You’d think I’d put ground glass in my husband’s meatloaf the way Mr. Krumfort went on! Another time, an offbeat clicking worried me and Mr. Krumfort came, all solicitude and reproachfulness. He gave the patient a few reassuring pokes with a screwdriver, then turned it on. It purred contentedly. Mr. Krumfort was sure I’d imagined the symptoms. “There seems to be nothing wrong with it now,” he opined, adding, “Maybe you make it nervous.”
