The heating element went out in my dryer and, since I paid the gross national product of a small Latin American country for a maintenance agreement, I called the handy dandy Sears man to come out and fix it. My decorating style could loosely be called casual, but the damp clothes hanging on every available surface was going too far. The next available repair date was only three days after I called, and it was my day off. Woohoo! Sears is like the cable company and you have to be available from 8-noon. Piss up a rope! I resigned myself to not being able to leave the house for many hours; it's amazing what I'll do for the convenience of electric clothes dryer goodness. Mister Sears repairman called at about 0900 and told me he would be there in "about a half hour." Oh, goody! I can work out before he gets here. Five minutes later, there is a knock at the door. What? Did he travel through a worm hole? This man has no concept of time. No matter, he will have to deal with the bed head and mismatched workout attire. I showed my savior to the dryer and continued on with my workout. I hear some banging around as he dismantles the front of my dryer and then the sound of a vacuum. Hmmm. The vacuuming continues for several minutes until I hear, "Ma'am? Could you come here?" I go to the laundry room where a disbelieving repair man informs me that the entire bottom of the dryer was full of lint, "which tells me you have an airflow problem." No kidding. He then puts me through a full interrogation of the last time I had the bottom of the dryer cleaned out. "Well, let me think....I've been in the house seven years, I bought these when I moved in, so.....never." What? I clean the lint trap nearly every time I use it. After an impromptu pep rally about March madness should equal dryer madness especially since I have the maintenance agreement and it's free (yeah, yeah, yeah) he then showed me the lint he pulled off the motor. Hey! That's molded to the shape of the motor. Erm, most of that is brown, crusty and smells like burning lint... "Ma'am, do you know that the dryer is still the leading cause of house fires? You're lucky you still have a house." Well, apparently! He then asked me where the dryer was vented. As I pointed behind me and toward the kitchen window he about had a plotz. "It raises this high and then goes another 50 feet!?!?" Yeah, dude, my contractor was an idiot, this doesn't come as the surprise to me that it is to you. The Sears god then went on to say that the vent tube was probably full of lint as well and needed to be cleaned and I had several options for that. 1)Go in the crawlspace (I don't think so) 2) hire duct cleaners which might run 300 bucks (yeah, just paid the homeowners association Nazis; not looking to cough up 300 extra bucks for something like this) 3) take the cover off the vent, detach the hose, get the leaf blower and shoot 200 mile an hour winds through the vent "but you didn't hear that from me." So totally my option! I would pay big money to do that! And I have two little indentured servants...uh, children, to clean all the crap up out of the yard! Woo doggies! Best part of this, I have a dryer that actually gets hot and dries clothes the first time through.

I have been laughing about this whole thing since it occurred, because I have a tendency to laugh at avoided tragedy. I told a friend who laughed along with me and then ratted me out to her husband. He doesn't find these things amusing as I do. So, now I've got an irritated Master Chief/volunteer firefighter coming to my house to whip things into shape. Monday might be a bad day!