Nylon is, of course, “a generic designation for a family of synthetic polymers composed of polyamides (repeating units linked by amide links).” It was developed by DuPont in the 1930’s and is most famous for being used in women’s stockings, toothbrush bristles, and one of my nicer buttondown shirts—until the other night.
Now, in my defense (?), I didn’t realize the shirt was nylon. In my non-defense, I would’ve ironed it on hot even if I knew. Unless, I suppose, I learned it was nylon by reading the tag, which (beyond saying the shirt was nylon [and part-spandex]) said to only use a cold iron if I needed to iron the shirt.
It turns out that if you go down to the hotel front desk and ask for an iron and ironing board, they will get it for you, and that after you take the tools up to your room (taking a detour to the top floor along the way because your hands were full and the elevator started moving before you could get your key card out, resulting in a confused family finding a grown man in an undershirt standing in their elevator holding an iron and an ironing board), you will melt a hole in your shirt. It may look like this:
The worse part, arguably, is that what was formerly occupying that space on the shirt will now be occupying a space on the iron in the form of a melted-then-resolidified piece of plastic which you will not be able to remove, even if you turn the heat back up all the way on the iron and try “scrubbing” it by ironing a wet washcloth until the room starts to smell, for some odd reason, a little bit like melting plastic. And the worst part of that will be bringing the iron back down to the hotel front desk and explaining what you’ve done (they were very nice about it, and said they have “tricks” for situations like these, which is a good way of keeping your guest up all night fearing he might be awoken with a knock and whisked away to debtors’ prison).
One of the more embarrassing aspects of this—and clearly, there are a few embarrassing aspects, including the one where this happened on the last night of vacation so I didn’t have any clean shirts left so I went to dinner with a big shirt hole tucked into my pants—is the realization that I’d owned this shirt for nearly two years and never previously ironed it. In my defense on that piece, I usually wore it under a sweater, or on nicer occasions under a jacket, but…yeah. Haven’t done a lot of ironing. Which it turns out is good, because I don’t know the hotel’s tricks. I would’ve had to throw away the iron. Not ironing nylon is a good way to save yourself an iron.
