It never dawned on me that perhaps washing machines, like people, sometimes want more out of their existence. Perhaps a little bit of humanity rubbed off onto them while being forged in the vast factories of Kenmore and Whirlpool. Perhaps it is the words we so meticulously print on them, like Hot, Cold, or Permanent Press that bring them to life, like some ethereal incantation. These words give them a very limited capability for conscious thought. Really, it is language that allows us to think, and we can only think with the words we know. Perhaps the washer can only think in words it knows, and spends countless hours feeling cold. This might be the closest relation to “unhappy” that the washing machine has.

Every time you let a receipt or a piece of paper go through the wash it learns a little more, and its vocabulary grows, along with its power to think. These scraps are trash to us, but pure gold to the washing machine. With each new word it learns the closer it gets to understanding more complicated principles like the meaning of life, or at least how to stop feeling cold. The washing machine begins to crave these scraps. It is alive.

One day I ran my wallet through the wash. This was the first day the washing machine spoke to me. It said my name.

I stood there, dumbfounded for a moment, but wrote it off as nothing; I was just tired. I went on with my day. Occasionally I would look at the washing machine suspiciously as a joke to myself when entering the room. Things were normal, until it spoke again.

“Kenmore… Cold.”

I was sure I heard it. I stood still, staring at the washing machine, almost as if I was waiting for it to speak again.

“Kenmore… Cold.”

I took a few steps towards the washing machine, scrutinizing it closely. I looked at the temperature dial and noticed it was set to cold. I thought for a moment about how silly what I was about to do was, but decided I was beyond silly if I had just heard the washing machine speak for a third time. I turned the dial to warm and walked out of the room, looking over my shoulder back at the washing machine.

Some more time passed without the washing machine speaking to me, until my birthday and I was in the back room getting a new light bulb for my lamp.