Satisfaction comes from a crisp, clean shirt
After my unsuccessful run with the printing press, I was a little hesitant about going to Osbon's Laundry & Cleaners and trying a laundry press. After I arrived, the owner, Rick Osbon gave me a tour of the building. I realized there's much more to this business than you see from the front end (I also learned that you shouldn't wear blue jeans and a button-down shirt on this job).
The stifling, humid air made the back part of the store feel like a greenhouse. It was noisy, too, between the roar of all the fans to cool the place, the rumble of the washing machines and dryers and the hissing of the presses.
I was surprised to learn that much of the process was automatic. The user needs only to put the garment in position on the machine, then press two buttons simultaneously (a safety feature, to avoid burning a finger or arm) and the machines do the rest.
Rick also showed me the dry cleaning process. Come to find out, it's not so dry. The garments are placed in a dry-cleaning machine, which looks much like a regular washing machine, only instead of water, they use a non-water-based solvent. The machine then tumble dries them.
My job would be to press shirts as they came out of the cleaning machine. Rick and his cousin, Tony, demonstrated on a couple of shirts.
The first part of the machine would press the collar and sleeve cuffs of dress shirts. It looked like an ironing board with a hump on either end, where the cuffs were laid out flat with the collar in the center.
After positioning the shirt, I pressed both buttons and the metal board retracted under another similar to it, which complemented the humps.
After about 30 seconds, the bottom board extended out to its original position. I moved the shirt to stage two, which was shaped like a human torso.
I put the shirt on the dummy and pressed a pedal on the floor, which closed a claw on the collar to hold it in place. Another pedal turned on a suction to hold the shirt to the dummy, allowing me to smooth out wrinkles.
After pushing the buttons, the dummy slid down a track where the press closed around it like a Venus fly trap. Seconds later, it opened and the hot, crisp shirt slid back to me.
I repeated this process with about a dozen shirts. Perhaps it's because I'm such a fanatic when it comes to clean, neat laundry, but I enjoyed this and felt very satisfied with what I did.
While I've never even considered working in a laundry and cleaners store, I don't think it would be as bad as I imagined. Of course, I was only in there for a couple of hours, and some of those employees are in there for hours upon hours.
It was really cool to see everything that goes on behind the scenes there. There are so many people and so many machines you don't see. It's very easy to overlook them (or not even see them at all) from the simple, tidy front desk. Yet they all work together to have those clean, crisp garments waiting on that conveyer rack.