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                   "Fine" Benny said and sat down exhausted, "Sarit left me".

                   After a while, the whole picture became clear. Sarit, Benny's wife, was fed
                   up with her mundane life, packed herself a suitcase and flew off to an

                   extreme 4x4 journey somewhere abroad. That is to say, she'll be back in a
                   few days, and until then pedantic Benny is supposed to run the household on

                   his own.
                   "This is all okay somehow" Benny said, "there's only one problem – she

                   didn't show me how to use the washing machine".
                   "One moment" I said, "do you mean to tell me that you don't know how to

                   use a washing machine?!"

                   "And you do know?" he attacked back.
                   "My wife does the laundry at our place" I defended,
                   "That's it exactly" Benny pounded a miserable pajama that rolled into his

                   hands, "laundry is a clear-cut feminine profession. All of the house chores

                   are somehow divided between the man and the woman, but the craft of
                   doing laundry belongs exclusively to the woman. And why?"

                   "Why indeed?"
                   "Because they won't let us do the laundry. They want us to do the dishes,

                   cook, clean the house, take care of the kids, hang the washed clothes to dry
                   – but to wash them ourselves - not that. And why?"

                   "Why really?"
                   "Because they want us to be dependent on them. That's why they claim we

                   don't know how to sort through the clothes and that because of us they get
                   ruined in the wash. You tell me, is it so complicated separating the white

                   from the colored laundry?"
                   "What" I wondered, "You need to separate them?"

                   "They just want us to be dependent on them" Benny crushed the pajama
                   between his hands.

                   "Believe me, we're lucky they wash our clothes after we've taken them off,
                   and not hang them out to dry along with us".

                   I tried to imagine it. I started feeling sick.
                   "Sarit always tells me that if her laundry isn't good enough for me, I should

                   do it myself" Benny said, "but she won't agree to explain to me how to work

                   the machine's operating programs. There are some fifty operating programs
                   in our washing machine, and believe me Sarit only knows how to use maybe
                   two of them, but she won't even agree to teach me this much. When she'll



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