BUSY WORK
by Pete Merrill - written March 2005

Did you know that 50% of all laundry loads are washed in warm water? That 35% is washed in cold water and 15% in hot water?

Well, by dang! I didn't either until I came across a fascinating article in my morning paper almost a year ago disseminated by the Soap and Detergent Association of America. I cut this article out of the paper with every intention of commenting on it at the time, but as things go around here the article got covered up in the "To Do" pile and was soon buried beyond recovery. It just turned up yesterday and I still feel compelled to comment.

To me, this article illustrates at least two important points.
One: there are too many people in the world and,
Two: a lot of them have too much time on their hands.

The Soap and Detergent people, I suppose, have a proprietary interest in knowing the water temperature of the average household load of wash (which, by the way is 7.4 loads per week) but do the rest of us give a hoot? I have lived four score and four years in complete ignorance of this statistic and am sure I could live out the rest of my span without knowing it, but now that I do, I find myself going around trying to impress people with how much I know about what goes on in the nation's laundry rooms.

By the way, did you know that women do 88% of the washing and that 1000 loads of wash are started every second of every day? I thought not.

In my mind's eye I have this vision of the great economic engine called the United States a bustle with energy, with goods being produced in factory and farm moving constantly from place to place carried by our massive transportation network, from loading dock to warehouse; millions toiling to bring the fruits of their labor to our local outlets and stores.

And then I see nicely dressed young men and women, with shiny shoes carrying clipboards, going door to door inquiring politely about the temperature of laundry water. Producing nothing, delivering nothing, adding little to the Gross Domestic Product except the questionable knowledge that households stock an average of eight cleaning items in their laundry room and that 99% of us have some type of detergent on hand.

Well, I suppose if the Soap and Detergent people think this is meaningful work and important information and are willing to pay people to do it then there is no reason for me to carp about it (other than the fact that I enjoy carping and am working on my Ph. D.in Curmudgeon).

There are millions of people in Namibia and Uganda and countless more in places from Kyrsikistan to Mozambique who don't give a hoot about how much we wash or if we ever do, but they sure wish they could get good jobs counting laundry loads like the good people down at Soap and Detergent.
This makes me wonder if perhaps the U.N. might initiate a worldwide program hiring the unemployed in every land to gather information on every topic, to be distributed to other people whether they want it or not. Come to think of it they may be doing this already.

Did you know that most items have a life expectancy of 50 washings?