SHRINKING POODLE
Our pet poodle, Shitemutt, has really nice, white fur, when it's kept right. The trouble is, it grows like mad bastard Russian Ivy, this fur. I know because the ivy that has long since colonised our garden shed and rendered it strange and unrecognisable still grows at a less demented rate than the hair on that cretin of a dog. I got sick of taking the thing to the salon every month, as it was costing us a fortune and I don't know why, but there's no such thing as a canine Supercuts. If there was such a thing as a canine Supercuts, none of this would have happened and our brain-dead, money-haemorrhaging pooch would not now look a fugitive from Toy fucking Town or a migrant from one of those silly miniature village bollockness that you used to go to when you were eight years old and on holiday in Torquay. Fucking pointless places. But I digress...
I lay the blame for the incident I am about to impart squarely with the washing machine. I will not name the make of this deadly contraption but a law suit is pending and soon the whole world will know exactly what happened and whose fault it was because so outrageous are the events I am about to relate, I am confident of the whole thing going utterly viral to the point of making it all the way to the second item on Channel 4 News when the story breaks. Here is what happened.
My best friend keeps this shaggy effort, which she claims is a canine of some description. She may have told me the manufacturer once but don't ask me what it is, because I neither know nor care and it's a rubbish dog anyway, if you ask me, especially baring in mind that all dogs are stupid and a waste of space and oxygen. But anyway, the fur regeneration on this thing used to be as problematic as our Shitemutt's ridiculous hair growth was and my friend was well pissed off having to go to the salon every four weeks, given that it was expensive and the place stunk so badly of dog hair. She had to have two showers as soon as she got back to the house. Plus this particular shave-shy canine idiot had recently taken to eating its own faeces, which devastated the kids, as one might imagine. It was the last straw because it meant that no matter how tight money might be, the cretinous creature had to go to dog spa every four weeks without fail. Frankly, the expense was unsustainable on my mate's budget and they had to skip the odd meal and the children sometimes went to school hungry. All so that the dog could be given its monthly seeing to.
All this to one side, my friend was okay with all this until some interfering school teacher alerted the nosy bastards at social services and they started knocking on the front door and showing an unhealthy interest in the welfare of her children. Many a time, she had to hide behind the couch until they went away and eventually, she realised she had to do something and was thinking of throwing the pointless bastard of a beast under a train and telling the kids it had run away and got lost forever on account of it being too stupid to have any sense of direction and find its way home.
But then one day, my friend was reading a magazine article and in the tips page, she noticed this item that suggested there was no need to go to some rip-off dog beautician chain in order to keep your pet from looking like an escapee from sixties Star-Trek-Ville. No, indeed, it said. All you had to do, apparently, was put the thing through a short wash and spin cycle, always making sure the water temperature was correct and you remembered to press the wool button.
Needless to say, my friend tried this and it worked a treat. Half an hour in the machine at the local launderette, and the dog emerged hairless and smelling of nothing more sinister than cheap soap suds. The real beauty of this was that it then took twice as long for the fur to grow back, so it was a double saving.
I was delighted to hear this, as you will no doubt have guessed, but I am a cautious person and I waited for my friend to repeat this process on two further occasions in case something went wrong and the thing imploded during the spin cycle or something. But not a bit of it. The entire thing went well every time and worked like a charm. My friend even tried ironing the mong the last time she took it out of the machine, with no ill effects, though I must say it looked a bit flat the last time I saw the thing.
So the other day, I waited for my husband to go to work (he was sceptical) and for the kids to leave for school, and I stuck the little critter right in there, along with some softener and an easy iron tablet. The machine and the dog were both making funny sucking noises from the get go but my friend said this was normal and so even though this was loud, it came as no real surprise. I was prepared for it and it caused me no alarm. There was no need to abandon the exercise, anyway, and it isn't as if the thing was fighting for breath or drowning or anything.
After a bit, the noise got louder and became a racket. So I nipped out for some bread and milk and when I got back, the machine had run its cycle but I couldn't really see the dog any more. I had to rummage around a bit before I could find it and fish it out lo and behold, the little fornicator had shrunk to the size of a runt of the litter baby gerbil. This did not seem good, at first flush and I wouldn't mind, but the bastard still had its fur and I had to try and dry it off with the vacuum cleaner. I should have known the little moron would then get sucked up into the mechanism, which it did, but no further harm was done and at least it came out dry when I pulled it out of the tube.
The washing machine isn't even a year old, so I don't know why this has happened. I checked the manual and there was fuck all to say you couldn't run your pet poodle through the thing. Don't put clothing pegs in there, the manual said, or the washing line, and it wouldn't work to try to make it double up as a dishwasher. But it said a big fat nothing about dogs and I read it through twice, just to make sure.
The biggest down side of this experience so far has been the the fact that the washing machine is now broken. It will not spin and the door won't even close, even when you boot it one or even try to mallet the thing shut, which I did. That only broke it more and needless to say, there was nothing in the manual about not taking a mallet to the bastard machine. Again, this omission is not really good enough on the manufacturer's part.
Needless to say, I went straight to a solicitor and an active application is in for Legal Aid as I write this. The law firm I'm using are pretty confident that this will be a multi million pound suit, on account of the dog shrinking so spectacularly, even though I used the wool button and remembered to make sure the timer was switched to the optimum setting, as my friend advised.
So I think the court will agree that none of this needed to happen and there is no way they are pinning any of this on me!!!!!!! I have never even as much as shrunk a sock, so skilled and expert am I in these matters and even now, I have a queue of character witnesses lined up ready to testify to this fact, so none of these corporate types need think they can go wriggling out of a pretty substantial settlement.
The good thing about this, other than all the financial compensation coming our way and the fact that Shitemutt is about to be famous (the Guinness Book of Records people have been alerted), is the fact that trips to the doggie salon will be a cheap as chips experience compared to before on account of the significant shrinkage in surface area requiring attention. So although I am outraged and everything, what with the manual not saying about not putting pet poodles through a cycle or hitting the door with a mallet, I still think this has all worked out for the best and I would recommend (nay, absolutely urge) that people follow my lead and do it before the washing machine manufacturers can suddenly recall all the models in order to evade further potential litigation. Also, the kids think the dog is far cuter now, and there's a novelty factor that certainly wasn't there before, given poodles of unremarkable dimensions are common as muck and ours now looks like a complete freak of nature.
And this, dear reader, has been the story of the incredible shrinking poodle. I hope you will take my advice and I hope you will make a load of money out of it too.
Mrs I. Liesalot.
September 2014
