I have a dryer that doesn't dry. You would think that if you are a household appliance and you only have one job, you should just do it. And yet our dryer seems to have missed the memo and only kind-of-dries in the most minimal way a dryer can dry, which is to say, not really much at all.

I've had petulant appliances before. There was the dishwasher that flooded the kitchen out of spite when I overloaded it, the toaster oven that burnt all the toast and the garage refrigerator that stopped refrigerating when I hit it with the car for the umpteenth time. In the case of the refrigerator, I could understand why it would stop working, but the others just seemed to want to torment me.

"Maybe it's you," said my husband when I went on my latest appliance rant.

"What do you mean it's me?" I replied.

"Well, doesn't it seem like an awfully big coincidence that ALL your appliances would revolt against you?"

"What's your point?"

"Maybe... you have an appliance curse."

"You think I angered an appliance god and they put a whammy on me?" I wondered.

"With you, honey, anything is possible," he retorted.

Naturally, the dryer had stopped working properly pretty much the minute the warranty expired. It seemed to be in cahoots with the vacuum cleaner, which did the same thing. Some people think the world is out to get them. I'm pretty sure the appliances of the world are out to get me. I assume it's some kind of show of solidarity for the time I threw the coffee machine across the kitchen when it shot espresso out instead of down and nailed me and the white shirt I rode in on.

But back to the dryer. It especially seemed to take great delight in spinning my sheets and towels into a ball so nothing inside the ball dried. I know that a lot of people have similar dryer frustrations, but my dryer has it in for all my other clothes as well. If I were to put even one lone sock into the dryer for a full cycle, that too would come out damp at the end. Of course, it would only be one sock, because the washer, which also has it in for me, would have already made the other sock in the pair disappear.

Back in my great-grandmother's day, they had to do the dishes and wash the clothes by hand, take the rug out back and beat it with a stick, and make a bad cup of coffee in a pan over a fire. Do I feel fortunate that we have all these modern appliances now, so I don't have to burn my toast over an open flame instead of having my toaster oven burn it for me? Yes. But why did it seem that they'd had enough appliancing and were rising up Terminator-style to overthrow mankind one lone sock at a time?

"Meanwhile, I still don't know what to do with the sheets that roll up in a ball in the dryer so nothing else gets dry," I said to my husband.

"Isn't it obvious?" said my husband.

"Get a new dryer?" I wondered.

"No," he replied. "Just don't wash the sheets."

Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.

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