I’m challenged by this whole ironing thing. What a pain in the ass. I suppose ironing pants isn’t too bad – up one side, flip, and then down the other side; unless you’re a total imbecile, you’ll end up with a passable crease. Even a monkey could iron a pair of pants.
But shirts? No way. I can manage to smooth out that vast field of fabric across the back of the shirt, and maybe do the collar, but the arms? The shoulders? Forget it.
Some people don’t seem to mind ironing though. Judging by the staff at our local dry cleaners, Chinese people are proficient ironers. The Nordic Warrior Queen is an excellent ironer, even though I’m sure she’d rather be doing something else. And my mother in law, affectionately referred to as Judy-wan-Kenobi? She’s crazy for ironing. This woman even irons t-shirts! How sick is that? (Somehow, I don’t think she’ll be ironing MY t-shirts any more).
This is probably the thing I hate the most about traveling. Because when you travel, the clothes in your suitcase get wrinkled.
This means that, besides the general inconvenience of travel – driving to the airport, maneuvering the parking garage, being groped at airport security, and when you finally do manage to board the plane, the guy sitting next to you is snarfing a Pizza Hut pizza and ends up SNIFFING the whole way there, and then you have to rent a car, drive through a strange city, find the hotel, carry all your crap inside, check in, and hope they haven’t put you next to some honeymooning couple banging the headboard all night long – at the end of the trip, you’re left with a suitcase full of wrinkled clothes.
It’s inevitable, no matter how carefully you pack.
Don’t get me wrong. I tried once to iron my clothes at the hotel, but I couldn’t even figure out how to open that little pseudo ironing board without pinching my fingers, and ended up saying fuck it and went to work looking like a hick.
But the next morning, entirely by accident, I developed an ingenious alternative to ironing.
I got up early, made a pot of that crappy hotel room coffee, channel surfed for a while, and took a hot shower. And when I get out, I noticed how nice and steamy the air was and thought of my wrinkled shirts hanging in the closet. So I turned the shower back on, cranked the water all the way up until it was scalding hot, hung one of my shirts from the rod, closed the door, and crossed my fingers.
It worked like a dream. Fifteen minutes later, the shirt was smooth and wrinkle-free. Sure, it might have been a little damp when I put it on, but still it looked like it had just left the highly-efficient ironing board of my mother in law.
I’m sure all you tree-huggers out there are wringing your hands over all that wasted water, but I don’t care. I’ve never been accused of being an environmentalist. And is my ironing-avoidance procedure really so different than heating up that clunky old iron for twenty minutes just to press a stupid shirt?
Anyway, my plan backfired on me.
The next morning, I followed the same procedure. My shirt was steaming away in the shower while I was performing my daily ablutions – shaving, applying deodorant, trimming nose hairs – and eagerly anticipating my perfectly pressed shirt. But then a terrible thing happened.
The fire alarm in my room began to shriek. Shit.
What I didn’t know was that the fire sensor was just outside the bathroom door. I guess the steam from shower was hot enough to set the damned thing off. Within moments, I could hear people yelling from the room next door, hotel guests running down the hallway, doors slamming. Then the phone began to ring.
I was standing there in my underwear with my mouth full of toothpaste, trying to disable that shrieking wall-mounted bitch, when someone started pounding on the door.
I peeked through the security hole to see a fireman standing outside my door. He was completely decked out with re-breather tanks, fireproof clothing, rescue gear, and even a frigging axe if you can believe it.
Jesus, how did he get here so fast? Do firemen sleep at the hotel, I wondered?
I opened the door. “Sir, we have a report of a fire in your room.”
“Mmmmhhmmhm.” My mouth was still full of toothpaste.
“Excuse me sir?”
“Mmmmhhhmmmhmmmhmmmm,” I said, and went to the sink to spit. He followed me inside. By the time I’d rinsed out my mouth, he’d silenced the alarm.
I explained what happened: how I was trying to get the wrinkles out of my shirt, and the steam from the shower had set off the alarm, but he looked dubious. He’d really wanted to put out a fire. He looked around my room, apparently not trusting that I know what a fire looks like, but after a brief inspection he seemed satisfied that my room was secure.
At the door, he turned to me. “You shouldn’t waste all that water, sir,” he said. “Why don’t you use the iron,” and took his clanking gear down the hall.
I put on my last wrinkle-free shirt, pulled on a pair of pants, grabbed my laptop bag, and went to work, sneaking out the back door of the hotel.
It looks like I’d better learn how to iron.