Of exploding washing machines and friends who help you smell nice

A few months ago, at a time when things weren’t going that great for the duck and me and I had lots of stuff to do, I was waiting for our laundry to be done while I went about my weekend schedule (while the duck was taking a particularly long nap).
As I got to the laundry room I noticed that the washing machine was fuming – did it always do that? As I opened its door I was greeted by more fume and the unhealthy smell of burnt rubber; the washing machine had broken down with the duck and my laundry still in it! Awesome! Another thing to add to my to-do list…
I hung up the laundry in the bathroom, opened the window and hoped that our clothes would smell a bit better after a while. Well, instead, now the bathroom smelled like burnt rubber as well and I was fuming. I didn’t have enough clothes to last me another week until, if we were lucky, the washing machine might get repaired, and, apart from probably gifting me lots of personal space on the train (which is pretty good these days), I didn’t see any advantage in wearing extremely smelly and possibly headache-inducing clothes.
Fortunately, I had the duck and my favorite Berlin person Sb living nearby who spontaneously squeezed me into her weekend schedule so that I and my smelly clothes could public transport travel over, and Sb and I could watch the last Harry Potter movie, thus finishing our 2020 Harry Potter catch-up series (because she had never seen the movies before) while her washing machine tried to wash away all the terrible smells. The laundry came out smelling better, good enough for me to not worry about getting a headache in my T-shirts, and her washing machine didn’t take on the burnt rubber smell like our bathroom had. The laundry and I traveled back, I hung it up in the bathroom again, but this time the bathroom kept its bathroom smell, and I continued to work through my weekend to-do list. This really made the duck and me appreciate our friends and we learned to never take having a washing machine for granted again – especially now that we regularly need to wash our boring-looking cotton masks.