I know that some folks love to iron. I, however, am not one of them.
I was in high school in the ‘80s, that decade when clothes were either made of rayon, which has to be ironed, or that cottony material that, even when you do iron it looks like you crumpled it up and stepped on it before you got dressed.
During my freshman year in high school, my mom decided if all my clothes needed ironing, she would teach me how to do it.
While I loved how sharp my clothes looked, I never took joy in the task. Often, I’d put on the TV and hope to get swept away by the characters on the screen while I went through the pile of laundry, one sweep of hot metal at a time.
I think my iron revulsion comes from when I was 18 months old. My super, over-protective mom turned her back for just a minute, and I ran my little self over to the ironing board and grabbed firmly on to the top of it.
As you know, ironing boards aren’t exactly the most sturdy of contraptions, and the iron fell down.
Smack on my hand…
I’ll give you a moment to wince and shiver.
Ready? Okay…
As I said, irons and I have not been best friends. Recently, when I traveled to New York City to speak on a humor panel at a journalists’ conference, I wasn’t surprised that the iron in my room was against me.
Well, at first it wasn’t.
I’ve learned to pack more clothes in my suitcase by doing that rolling up thing that all the professional organizers teach.
What they don’t say is that your clothes then look like Columbo’s raincoat.
And while I liked Peter Falk as an actor, he’s not the guy I would turn to for fashion advice. At least not as Columbo.
Because I want to look good, or at least professional, I iron my clothes.
I did what one normally does—I took out the iron, plugged it in, and set up the ironing board in my hotel room.
After it heated up, I ironed my clothes for that day. Easy Peasy. Everything went as it should have. I got neat, crisp clothes, and all was well in the world.
Until the next morning…
Of course, that was the actual day I was to speak, so I wanted to look my best. I got out the iron—which had worked just fine the day before. I checked the water level, and it still had plenty.
I turned it on and waited for it to warm up.
All of a sudden, I hear this loud beeping noise. I looked at the iron and thought, “Do irons make beeping noises?”
Um, no, they don’t.
But smoke alarms in your hotel rooms do.
Seems that the iron began smoking, for no apparent reason other than that it hated me. Or it hated its job. It was just tired of ironing for all these folks who just used it and threw it aside with not so much as a “thank-you.”
So I did what anyone would have done in my situation: I jumped up on the bed and began to wave a folder in front of the smoke alarm.
It stopped. All was right, perhaps not in the world, but at least in my hotel room.
Then I made a mistake. I thought it must have been a fluke, and I decided to try to use the iron again.
After checking it over, I plugged it in.
This time, it began smoking like crazy. The alarm went off—BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.
I jumped on the bed and waved the folder again. It kept screeching.
Then I realized that hotel security or someone important was probably going to come charging into my room to make sure there was no fire.
And they would find me in my underwear, waving a pastel pink folder at the ceiling.
Just when I was ready to rip the alarm down, I found a button on it and pushed.
Silence…
I decided to wear my clothes crumpled because, at this point, I didn’t have time to get another iron from housekeeping. I might look like I had gotten them off the floor of a dorm room, but at least I wouldn’t make the front page of the New York Post—Satan’s Iron Attacks Tourist!
From now on, I’m buying wrinkle-free clothes.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not sitting around in wrinkled clothing expecting a possessed iron to show up, writes Wojo’s World™ from Baltimore.