For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for June 21, 2012

back to the drawing board

Laundered money.

Don’t forget repayments include 50% loan charge at least…

Guess what she spent part of it on?

gmartin997 I retired from an industrial laundry and money was always falling out of pants pockets. Never knew who it belonged to.

In my house money alway found in machines.

Nah – it does fall out. I’ve found bills in the dryer.

Yet another lesson in responsibility, Michael – learn now, less problems later!

Why does she look so upset about spending it? If it’s came from John’s pocket, it’s hers also. My husband’s and my money are all the same. He doesn’t get upset if I spend it, even if it’s on frivolous things. And if it’s Michael’s, just pay him back. Yes, he should watch what goes in the laundry, but it’s his. It would be mean to say “finders keepers, losers weepers” at that age. Wait until he’s a teenager… ;-)

Has always been a house rule: If you do laundry and find money in the washer or dryer it is yours. Moral: Be SURE your pockets are empty before you put your clothes in the hamper.

Whatever I finds, I keeps! The one unbreakable rule for the laundress of the house.

I found $12 in the washer, once. Mostly I find coins but there are bills every once in a while. I keep it, it’s my toll for doing all the laundry.

With us, the washer was out of action for over a day one… luckily, step-by-step troubleshooting spared us from calling out an expensive engineer. Dismantling the filter in the outlet pipe revealed the problem… less than a pound in loose change clogging the pipe and preventing free circulation fo water. And oddly enough, whatever chemical was in the water turned “silver” coins black…

In Lynn’s notes, she says that money is made from paper. She is WRONG. Since I think the early 1900’s money was made from 100% Cotton. NO wood pulp at all!Now, that has changed with the introduction of Polymer bills in 2011…

“Folding money doesn’t fall out of a pair of jeans in the washing machine.”Sorry, but I beg to differ – though it’s more likely to fall out in the dryer. The pockets of an in-law whose clothes I’ve done have shed folding money, coins from various countries (business travels), a wallet, keys, maybe a passport, random hardware, and other things I can’t recall. Recently he did his laundry, and the dryer sounded like Fourth-of-July-come-early!

This is just like my husband, always leaving money in his pockets.

Now where does the lesson of taking someone else’s money come from?

My mom always had to be very careful when cleaning dads overaull pockets before washing – there could be matches and razor blades!

Michael learned his lesson hard-check your pockets every time you want your pants washed. Surely Ellie will buy her boy those roller skates.

I remember a story – think it was Reader’s Digest – mother told her son that if he left any money in his pockets of clothes to be washed, that she automatically gets it and puts it in a jar for them to later go out to eat at a restaurant. Later she sees him getting some pants ready for the wash and checking his pockets and she feels vindicated. Then she sees him open his wallet and put a couple of dollars BACK in his pants pocket and throw it into the wash to be cleaned….

Wow!!!!! That sure was fast!!! If she’s that desperate for money, then she needs to either quit her volunteer job and get a paying one . . . or she needs to ask John to up her weekly/monthly household expense allowance because she’s obviously not getting enough from him to live on if she’s taking “found” cash out of the laundry and quickly spending it without even caring to find out who it belongs to before they have an opportunity to report it missing!!!

I never find money when I do laundry. If anything, I’m more likely to find shredded Kleenex or paper (from a to-do list) all over the washer, dryer (or even on the other clothes) that came from inside my pockets instead! Yuck! So I check very carefully these days. As for my husband, he’s pretty good about emptying his pockets before throwing his clothes in the laundry due to other things of his I’ve washed in the past that I shouldn’t have — like ink pens or even his father’s pocket knife. But even if I did find money in the laundry, I wouldn’t keep it. I’d return it to its rightful owner because it just wouldn’t be right otherwise.

On rare occasions I’ve found Kleenex in the dryer neatly washed and dried and ready to be re-used!

At least she came clean. :-)

No excuse! She should have been able to tell her son’s pants apart from her husband’s. At Michael’s age, they’re noticeably different in size.