Diary of a Mad Scientist

well, I finally had a fire in the line of biodiesel duty. A little one.

I set a laundromat dryer on fire after drying a triple-washed load of formerly oily shop rags. It was really funny in that nervous funny sort of way.

I’m not sure whether it’s really the oil or a defective dryer that caused the fire, as I’d actually washed the rags through three washer cycles and there really was no oil left on them that I could find.

I’d left the rags in the dryer for 45 minutes because the machines at the 24 hour laundromat tend to run too cool (reminds me of going into a laundromat on the Lower East Side in the 80’s to discover that they’d set the dryers ’slider’ to the coolest ‘air fluff’ setting, and had removed the levers so they couldn’t be adjusted back to hot- so that people would feed the machine an inordinate amount of quarters).

I went back to the shop (no one’s going to steal a load of shop rags, right?), got a call from my mechanic friend saying that the car was ready, ran an errand in the truck that was replacing the car at the shop, went to West Oakland to pick up the car and drop off the truck, chatted with the mechanic, found myself hungry enough to eat a cow on the way back to Berkeley, picked up the boyfriend, went on a wild goose chase looking for noodle soup just to find all the Asian noodle places closed early. The dinner we did find just about slayed me and I had a massive food coma/energy crash. The whole time I had shop rags on the brain. I had to crawl into bed for an hour with a drafting textbook to recover enough energy to continue. By then it was midnight and I only got out of bed because of … the rags… the rags… gotta go get the rags out of the dryer…

Well, my load of laundry was missing and there was a block of 4 dryers with fresh new ‘out of order’ signs on them where my laundry used to be. I poked around the laundromat figuring that they’d taken the rags out due to them being hours overdue and maybe smelly.

Finally found the attendant mopping floors in the bathrooms. He says, oh. Was they red rags? Did you have chemicals on them or something? well, they caught fire! He gave me the tour. little melted bits of shoprag in the dryer. Big black mess in the parking lot where they’d dumped the burning pile and hosed it down. trash bag in the dumpster with a wet, charred gooey mess that used to be my rag collection.

…oops.