This week has been an adventure in laundry. We suspected that our front-loading washing machine is also a dryer, so S took the owner's manual (all in Japanese, most in kanji) to the university for some translating help from his teaching assistants. The good news is that it is a dryer (the bad news is that it takes about as long as hanging the diapers on the balcony, which we'll continue to do).
In attempting to operate the dryer, I somehow activated the child safety lock on the door. One of the few things on the washer/dryer that I can read is the katakana for "door-locked." This blinking red light mocked me for two days as I pushed various buttons which caused my clothes to be washed three times and dried once, but did not cause the door to unlock.
My clothes were finally liberated today. We have to pay the rent in person (in cash!) at the real estate office, and today happened to be the day. S took the manual and was able to find a nice person (who is still no doubt laughing at us) to explain to him how to deactivate the child safety lock so that he could explain it to me via cell phone.
In this instance, I rather wish I was totally illiterate. I didn't know enough kanji to read the instructions in the manual, but I did know enough katakana to read that dumb "door-locked" light everytime I walked by.
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