Electronics show unfolds the latest high-tech wrinkles

The Consumer Electronics Show was held in Las Vegas recently and it displayed more than 4,000 of technology’s newest advances for humankind that humankind never realized it needed. A toothbrush that cleans teeth in 10 seconds. A bread-making robot. Another robot that makes beer.

The only one that intrigued me was a robot called Foldimate.

Foldimate, which looks something like a home printer on steroids, is designed to fold clothes. According to its specs, you can feed in a full load of laundry and it will fold about 25 items of various materials and sizes in under five minutes. It’s expected to be available before the end of the year and cost $1,000. Which would be well worth the price, if only to save my marriage. Because many of our most contentious moments involve folding.

Included in my many marital failings is an inability to fold clothes the way my wife insists they deserve to be folded. I’ve tried. Lord knows I’ve tried. Recently for instance, I concentrated while she demonstrated how to fold a sweater: place it face down, arrange the sleeves across the back of the sweater in a crisscross pattern, then fold one edge and then the other until the edges meet in the middle.

The next time a sweater needed folding, I did it exactly that way. When I put it on a few days later, she looked at me and demanded, “Did you just crumple that sweater and lob it onto the shelf ?”

So, at first glance, a Foldimate sounded like the perfect solution; my sweaters would be wrinkle-free and all would be well in our household. But then I discovered that among the things it could NOT handle were towels and bedsheets.

Sometimes, in my neverending quest to be an even more perfect husband, I try to help when my wife is folding freshly-laundered towels. When I get done folding my share, she shakes her head, then unfolds them and refolds them. We go through the same dance with underwear, even though I don’t understand why underwear needs to be folded in the first place.

But I’ve completely given up on bedsheets and pillow cases, which need to be folded into perfect squares before they are suitable to live in the linen closet. Fitted bedsheets are the worst — I’m convinced it’s geometrically impossible to take anything with rounded corners and fold it into a square. So as soon as I see the sheets coming out of the dryer, I suddenly remember urgent business that requires me to be at the office within the next five minutes.

Maybe I should just give up folding and get one of those beer-making robots.