He awoke with a start, to a sound he would later compare to an electric RC toy car motor being beaten to death by Darth Vader's breathing machine.
He stumbled across the house in the haze of twenty minutes sleep, the halls still dark, the corners still honed with that night-time sharpness they only get when the sun is down. He made his way to the back room, behind the kitchen. Really, it was just a closet, but it made the little house on the outside of town feel a whole lot bigger to call it a laundry room instead of the little space where the combo washer-drier just barely fit.
Just barely used to fit, he ammended, looking at the wreck of twisted metal that was left of the machine, where its motor had decided that after five years, enough was enough, and ripped a hole not through the side or bottom of the apparatus, not the easy way, but had instead jumped all the way though both machines, joining with the drier motor half-way up, and the two of them leaping like Thelma and Louise out through the top of the drier portion of the combo.
He had to hand it to them, it was a daring escape, the likes of which he had never seen, and which, many years later as he died in a car accident off the coast of Georgia, he realized he would never see again.
So this was it. He now had to ask himself the hard question: a new washer-drier combo, or a new laptop so he could continue to work at home; clean shirts so he could go to the office again, or a clean hard drive so he'd never have to; something to fill the void in his kitchen closet, or something to fill the void in his social life. He called Goodwill to come haul the thing away, talking the poor operator on the other end into believing it reparable and resalable.
Those poor people; on the other hand, now he wouldn't have to pay to dispose of the mostrosity of twisted metal and red and green and yellow wires that used to clean his most intimate of clothes, that used to remove the night before from his sheets, the woman before from his shirts and the bar before from his socks. He kept finding his memories tied to the oddest things, at the oddest moments. You don't miss your washer 'til your wealth runs dry.
And so back to the point. A new laptop, or a new washer-drier?