Holy Dryer Fire, Batman!!!

Okay, my dryer did NOT catch fire. But someone is watching out for me because it damned well could have.

I bought new towels for Hubbie and myself for our anniversary. I washed and dried them this morning. We religiously clean the lint trap. Part of it is an OCD thing. I love when I wash something fluffy and there is a ton of lint to scrape off. I always feel disappointed when there isn't much fluff. But I digress.

The towels were so soft! I pulled the lint screen out of its home and scraped off a shitload of lint! WooHoo! And it was super soft, too! I went to put the screen back and saw that not all of the red lint had gotten on the screen. There was still some down in the place where the screen lives. I went to pull out the little bits of red lint that I could see and thought I saw something else.

Huh? What is that?

I couldn't see very well. So I got a flashlight. And thank god I was already sitting down when I peered into the nether regions of my dryer.

Here is what I pulled out on the initial extraction.

I started with metal tongs reaching in and grabbing what I could. Piece after piece after nasty piece. Check with the flashlight, extract another chunk. When I couldn't reach any more with the metal tongs, I switched to a wooden chopstick. That did not get me very far, so I switched to an even more sophisticated tool--LittleMan's plastic golf driver. When that no longer worked, I switched to the plastic clothes hanger. That ended up being the best thing to use as it was a little bit bendy, and I could kind of poke it around and pull out even more crap.

Here is the end result.

There was all manner of nasty things in there. I absolutely could not believe the things I was finding. Pistachio shells, coins, hair barrettes, q-tips. MATCHES for crying out loud!! Who the fuck puts matches through the washer and dryer? Here is a picture of some of the “treasures” I found.

I was completely convinced that I had cleaned out this particular lint trap upon moving into this townhouse. Upon further reflection, I realized that I had gone through this process when I bought my condo in ATL, but that I had, in fact, not done it to the dryer in our new place. This is an old and shitty dryer. It has shrunk clothes that we have had for years and thought were unshrinkable. I am grateful that they left them for us to use, but holy dryer fire, Batman!!! Look at all this nasty shit I pulled out of there!!

And here is all the dryer fluff in a grocery bag for comparison.

After yanking all this stuff out and putting it into a bag, I felt like I ought to have an asthma attack or something.

So in the end:

1. I have a cleaner dryer.

2. I am more worried that the damned thing will catch on fire because if that is what I could reach, what the hell else is back there?

3. People are nasty. Do not trust your landlords to have your best interests at heart.

Oh, and I made fifty cents.

Who would have thought playing Operation as a kid would turn out to be so useful?