All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

About a month ago, our clothes dryer started getting pretty loud. At first we weren't even sure if it was really increasing in volume, or if it was just our imagination. But over this past weekend, there was no confusing it: you could stand outside our house on the opposite side of the street and hear our dryer.

It wasn't a rumbling or a knocking. It was just doing its dryer thing, but extra loudly. The sucky part is that the dryer is only 15 months old. Nothing too major should go wrong, right?

Well, at first the repairman diagnosed it as a warped motor, which was a $240 repair. After I about crapped my pants, he tinkered on it a little more, reached into the blower and pulled out a handful of used fabric softener sheets, and said, "Here's your problem."

Fabric softener sheets. Like Bounce or whatever. They get sucked up into the blower and wreak havoc.

He went on to say that those things keep dryer repairmen in business. I commented that the owner's manual certainly doesn't say anything about not using them, and he said that while he didn't know why that was, he was thankful for the business it generated and that we ought to start using liquid fabric softener.

So there's your tip for the day--the tip it cost me $95 to hear: don't use fabric softener sheets.

This public service message was NOT brought to you by Whirlpool, though it should have been.