The Underpants Rule

I mean that as in, 'The rule of the Underpants', not 'Yeah! Underpants! They're ace!', you understand.

I meant to blog yesterday about the adventure of the laundrette, but forgot in all the cockaroach related furore. So here is the post you would have had, were it not for the Scuttling Menace.

Before I left England for Belge my best friend popped over to say goodbye. We sat on my bed amongst the piles of clothes and shoes and books and new house paraphinalia and chatted, about how she would soon be coming to visit and about how we could go travelling and check out the Christmas markets in Germany and how we would both be okay communicating online rather than face to face and both feeling a little sad. (I was, anyway, I damn well hope she was as well or I'll feel a bit silly). She paused during the inconsequential chatter for a moment and looked seriously at me.
"I'd like to give you one piece of advice for going away. It's important, so remember it." She cleared her throat and leant forward slightly.
"Always make sure, Amanda, that you have more underwear than him. Then if it gets bad - I mean, really bad - he'll have to do it before you will."
"He'll have to do what?" I asked, wide eyed.
"He'll have to do the washing."
At this she nodded sagely, sat back and carried on with the conversation that we had been previously having about shoes.
Keeping her advice in mind Ben and I launched an expedition to the laundrette, and after intially trying to read the wrong signs we worked out that it was all in all, quite easy. Whilst waiting for our drying to finish tumbling (Ben found it particularly entertaining - "Look, there go your jeans! And your knickers! Weeeeeeeeee! They're having the time of their lives!") we tried to work out a sign above the wall of heavy duty dryers.
"I expect its saying not to leave your drying in there after it's finished." Ben suggested, sensibly. We wrote it down anyway to translate later at home.

"Les clients qui sèchent du linge qu'ils ont lessive chez eux, sont priés de d'utiliser qu'un seul séchoir à la fois et de céder la priorité aux clients qui ont lessive dans ce lavoir."

Here's what Google made of it:
"Customers that dry clothes they wash their homes, are requested to use only one hair at a time and assign priority to customers who have laundry in the wash."

And Babelfish:
"The customers who dry of the linen qu' they have detergent on their premises, are requested of d' to use qu' only one drier at the same time and to yield the priority to the customers who have detergent in this laundrette"

Ben then said, equally sensibly, that someone could make a mint if they managed to design a new translating site that took both translations into account and than worked out what it probably meant, rather than giving a paragraph of previosuly unrelated text.

The Underpants Rule! Yeah!!!