AND AT DEB'S REQUEST....

After lugging my dirty ‘dry clean only clothes’ around with me to and fro work for several weeks hoping one of the days I would have enough patience and interest to drop them off, and after wearing a pair of pants specifically to get them dirty enough to warrant including them in the cleaners drop off batch, I finally had a spare moment in between my long overdue trip to the doctor and my appointment with the sofa, to stop by a cleaners. I wanted a place close to my apt and en route to work so I stopped at a place on Montrose.

I walked past the typical 40 washers and one woman doing her laundry to the back where it seemed someone should be working. there was a little corner office w/ a window that looked slightly business like. The man that appeared looked like he had just gotten out of a sleeping bag under the el…no offense to homeless people, old men or international people. I very quickly realized he didn’t speak much/any English. He was the kind of older man you would say, “oh look at that cute old man” if you would have seen him drinking coffee and reading the paper or playing a game of horse shoes speaking Polish w/ other old men. But not if you were entrusting almost $200 dollars worth of work clothes you were still paying for on your store credit.

I handed him my articles, he tousled them around as though they were a strange animal or a pile of unidentifiable objects. I said, “two shirts, two pants”. He repeated what I said. Then after a little more shuffling he managed to find a carbon copy slip and handed it to me w/ a pen. w/ the little training I’ve received in dry cleaning I filled it out as thoroughly as I could hoping this would improve the likely hood that these clothes would make it back, safe and clean, in my closet. I handed him the slip. And from his motions and slight words I gathered that he wanted me to write the quantity and kind of articles I was dropping off. I explained and showed to him that I had already done this. After he said, ‘ok’ or a version of the expression I think he felt he had performed all necessary duties for this transaction. I was still quite wary and was trying to think of something to do or ask to increase my confidence about leaving these things with him. I ruled out simply asking him, “will I ever see these clothes again?” and “are you really going to dry clean these?” and decided to ask, “do you know when these will be ready?” he again repeated what I said, and then threw out a date 6 or 7 days from that moment.

That was all I needed to make my decision, I apologized while quickly scooping up my clothes and heading for the door explaining I needed them much sooner than that but thank you very much. I have since taken them to a place I had used before, where the man typed my name into a computer and made small talk about the weather. They have been hanging in my closet, clean and in their plastic bag for the past week. :)