Elly the inept laundress: CONFIRMED.

[dreadedcandiru2]

As you know, I've long had the suspicion that the reason Elly is overwhelmed by her seemingly endless housework and the reason John wonders what she could be possibly doing all day is that in the words of the Engineer from Team Fortress 2, she just ain't doing it right. This is where the nasty little phrase 'moving the dirt around' comes into play because it looks to me as if she doesn't quite understand that she's doing most of her chores wrong. She might sweep porches furiously but she doesn't do much else. The reason that I mention this is that I've long suspected that the reason she does mounds of laundry every day is that just as she buys poor-quality sheets that don't last long, she never bothered learning the boring and inefficient trinity "whites, lights and darks."

What I mean by that is that I think that she's like her kids and John in that she just fires every damned thing into the machine all at once in order to save time. No amount of explaining that this could cause colours to run and no amount of imploring her to actually read the labels on the clothes to see what cycle to put them on or what temperature water to use can deflect her from ruining clothing by being a nitwit. This leads to her trying to fix her failures by failing even harder. The end result is a paranoid and angry mess who never learns from her mistakes.