I have a hate-hate relationship with irons.  While I theoretically understand the benefits of having clothes sans creases, crinkles and folds; I have sent far too many shirts to the landfill looking like they had scuff marks from black shoes.  I am quite certain my colleagues if they looked carefully would assume I fell on the subway and was trampled by Wall Street traders.  In my profession people judge you quickly, couture in disarray is not permissible in the unforgiving world under lights.

I would love to lie and tell you I bring every shirt to a professional laundry who happily waits for me to waltz in, however the truth of the matter is that I jam coins into a slot and hope I have enough whites for a full load so I can also use bleach.  I always walk in with soap, sprays, sticks, and dryer sheets like I have been called into military duty in a far-off land and can't go back for supplies.  I wear headphones and focus on the grim task (I should probably listen to Wagner the way I feel about laundry).  After 20 years of shrinking miles of shirt sleeves I finally learned to simply hang wet or at least damp shirts, not exposing them to heat.  From there, there is a lot of ironing to do so they are presentable.  My boss likes white shirts, so less-than-ironically I like white shirts.  White shirts don't look good with the rust, guck, bleeck, ick or whatever it is that comes out of iron after iron.  Sometimes it is so dark it looks like the ooze inside the eyeballs from an old character from a missing X-Files episode.

For a long time I thought this was a function of the price of the iron.  So, I got a very fancy purple one that did wonderful work for a week and then decided to die instantly.  The heating element gave out and in classic fashion I never save receipts, so 50 dollars lighter I set out to buy something in which the only requirement was that it got warm with the application of proper voltage.  I found that at K-Mart for 15 dollars, but in just a few weeks it did what every iron I always owned did.. ruin clothes by smearing seemingly impossible to remove stain juice over clean clothes.  This one also seemed to accumulate a tar-like substance on the heating face making every use an adventure.

I replaced that one recently with its sadistic brother or sister who I lost patience for today after it killed yet another shirt.  Today I bought the used Black and Decker unit above from Goodwill for $5.25.  I like it conceptually, get an iron from the same name of a business that makes hammers and drills: simple, spartan, effective.



Let me stop you from composing your e-mail to me about using distilled water and emptying the iron's water reserve after each use, yes, after a lifetime of not reading the directions I fully researched the topic today.  Why now?  Why not continue to be a stereotype of the momma's boy who needs someone to do this for him?  Because I do hundreds of harder tasks everyday.  Driving a 2700lb car down the highway at 70+mph is harder than using clean water in an iron.  Making coffee is probably harder.  Cutting my fingernails is harder.  I have hacked the operating system on my cell phone so it looks and operates exactly the way I want it to.  Not being able to run an iron? This is an admission of complete stupidity and narrow thinking.  The internet leaks advice on this topic faster than my iron leaks out brown minerals (mostly rust as it turns out, but not because internal parts are rusted).  I am committed to making this $5.25 investment pay off.



Ironing is one of those mundane afterthoughts for me, perhaps why I drifted so far.  In fact I often scramble and do this minutes before I run to work, up against the clock it is warm work and I don't enjoy it.  That said, I don't skip it.  I remember with perfect clarity when I was a young reporter at an NBC affiliate in Fargo, ND.  This was a shirt and tie job, and when I came to work one day my boss, Charley Johnson, asked me if I had ever HEARD of an iron.  I was shamefully unaware how critical it was.  I was on TV everyday, and at this point for a few years before realizing I looked like I had been pushed out of a moving boxcar everyday.  I love Charley, at least he had the common sense to tell me.  I always did whatever he said, it served me well.  And for all the journalism advice and career guidance it was perhaps this one thing which shows more than most.

A year ago I wrote a very similar blog (if I can find it I will add the link).  Let's hope a year from now I don't write another.