The laundry cart's front left wheel

Two-inch casters, four to a frame, support the wire basket of a rolling laundry cart, rated by its manufacturer for sixty pounds and loaded, in practice, well past that on any given Saturday. One wheel, invariably the front left, has developed a shimmy that announces the cart's location from two aisles away, a defect that survives replacement; swap the wheel and within a month the new one has learned the same complaint, as though the frame itself teaches it. Pushed empty, the cart drifts left without correction, a tendency regulars compensate for so automatically that most could not say, if asked, which way it pulls. Loaded with wet laundry, the same cart tracks straight, the extra weight apparently sufficient to override whatever is wrong with the geometry. This is either a design flaw or a design feature, depending on how charitably one reads the manufacturer's intent, and no one has ever called the manufacturer to ask. The wire mesh has one broken weld, patched with a twist of coat hanger by a hand no longer employed at the premises, holding for going on three years now. Between uses the cart sits nested against three others near the door, wheels locked or not depending on who parked it last, ready for the next load and entirely indifferent to how it gets there.

R. Quist