Thursday, December 03, 2009
coming clean
I finally succumbed to another luxury of Mexico.
In The States, I would never consider taking my laundry to a stranger. That would have been the moral equivalent of airing my dirty linen in public.
Oops. I guess that is literally what I did. (Notet to Joe Biden. This is what "literally" means.)
We were all taught from a young age how to use the washer and dryer, and how to fold and store clothes. Asking someone to do that for you would have been unthinkable. Lazy. Sybaritic. Just not done.
Well, after eight months of fighting the washing machine at the house on the beach, I surrendered. I had three weeks of laundry (starting with clothes from my two-week vacation), and I simply did not want to deal with a machine that manages to get grit in clothes after they are washed.
When my brother was here, he found a laundress two blocks from the house. That was in May. But I am a bit slower than my sainted brother. It took me a bit longer to get there, but I dropped off my large pile of laundry this morning.
She weighed it, asked me to fill out a claim form, and then showed me the price: 660 pesos -- due on pick up at 5 this afternoon. As I was driving away, I started thinking about that figure. It seemed just a bit high to me. That would be about $51 (US). Of course, there were lots of clothes, and they were really dirty.
The calculator she used had about six zeros following the 66. I just assumed the decimal point. 660 pesos seemed too high. But 66 pesos seemed ridiculously low (about $5 (US) for over a suitcase full of laundry.
For those of you who have used these services, you know the answer. The bill was 66 pesos. For the cost of an American magazine, she washed, dried, ironed, folded, and packaged three weeks of laundry.
This is a service I am going to use more often. My Protestant ethic will simply need to be readjusted. Certainly, I can do my laundry myself. But she does it better and it takes one camping inconvenience off of my things to do in Mexico.
Luxury or not. My laundress has a new customer.
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