Fran, the washing machine, washes out stains from clothes and exposes the lies of the people who wear them. Fran is a washing machine in a laundry, dry-cleaning and minor repair business in an up-market neighbourhood where many wealthy and politically well-connected people live. She is the favorite of the business owner, Max, who gives her the laundry of his favorite clients. Fran thus gets to wash the bed linen, clothes (eg trousers, dresses, underwear, shirts, handkerchiefs) etc of some very wealthy, famous and important people. While being washed, the linen and clothes tell Fran about their “lives” with their owners — that is, the lies and secret activities of their owners. In other words, the items being washed gossip. Max is unmarried, lonely and not particularly bright. He has worked in the laundromat since he was in his mid-teens and only owns the laundromat because his childless aunt left it to him when she died. Max often leans on Fran and talks to her when he feels the need to communicate. And, he mostly talks about his clients — saying what lovely people they are (mainly because they are nice to him) and how exciting and good their lives must be. What Max does not know is that Fran has, over the years, learnt to understand what he is saying. However, she has no obvious mechanism (eg mouth, speakers) to reply to his conversation. She wants to tell him all the gossip that she has heard from the panties, trousers, sheets etc – but cannot! She is consequently very frustrated. Thus, each story starts with a scene of someone bringing in laundry, having a conversation with Max and lying. When Fran is washing, Max leans on her saying what nice people his customers are what he thinks about their lives based on what the clients have just told him. Later, as Fran starts washing, and talking to the items being washed, the truth — and generally negative side of human (customer) nature — emerges. Finally, the customer returns to the laundromat to collect their clean items, and the truth is revealed in a more human form to the reader — although Max is rarely smart enough to understand and recognize it.

This site, Fran Wash Gossip “Club” focusses on the “private” lives of people from all walks of life. The sister site — ie Fran Wash Gossip “Com” — aims to expose the professional activities, lies and secrets of more public figures.
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This general scene of Fran and Max suddenly changed one day. For many years police from a nearby police station had been bringing their dirty uniforms to the laundromat, and Max — being very respectful of the law — always washed the uniforms in Fran. The uniforms knew a lot about criminal activity because they got to talk to the clothes etc of both victims and criminals. Fran was discussing one case with several uniforms while washing them and really wanted to tell Max (and the police) who the guilty person was. But, as usual, she could not. Then, suddenly, her frustration led her to change her normal boring repetitive washing sound to a rough but recognizable version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising”. Max’s aunty had instilled in Max a love of music and Fran’s version of this song was enough to cause Max to begin humming and then singing some of the lyrics. He was still doing so sometime later when a policeman came to collect the washing and told him about a particular crime that was proving difficult to solve. Still in his singing frame of mind, Max said: “One eye is taken for an eye”. The policeman looked at Max for a while and then said: “Yes! You are right. It was revenge for what happened before. To make things equal. You are brilliant!” Max really did not know why he had said those words from the song, but was very pleased that the policeman was saying nice things about him. Fran was very excited that she had found some way to communicate with Max, and she was able to use the same method a few weeks later when police uniforms told her about another crime. And, again, Max was to unwittingly help police to solve it. Max soon had a reputation with the police as someone who — with a few words of insight — could significantly help in solving difficult criminal cases.
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One day a young psychologist named Latty heard a story about Max’s supposed insights into criminal cases. She was very surprised because her mother often had items washed in the laundromat and had, on a number of occasions, commented adversely on Max and his “love” for an old washing machine. Out of curiosity and looking for a suitable PhD topic, Latty brought some of her washing to the laundromat even though she had a washing machine in her own apartment. When she mentioned her mother’s name, Max said that he would wash her things in Fran. After Max had put her few things along with some other washing in Fran and set the process going, Latty made a big effort to engage Max in conversation about a numbers of topics. By the end of the wash she had concluded that the stories about his intellectual prowess concerning the criminal mind could not possibly be true. And she could not understand why Max was so attached to Fran, which was really no more than an old washing machine which sometimes sounded like it was playing strange music instead of emitting a normal washing machine sound. As she walked home with her washing, Latty found herself repeating some words which she seemed to have heard somewhere but could not remember when or where: “Even when I committed crimes I didn’t mean it. It was unintentional.” Over the next few days, Latty could not get the words out of her mind. In any case, she decided to go to the laundromat one more time and try to engage Max in intelligent conversation. It was only when Fran started to wash that Latty realized where the strange words in her head had come from. Despite being positive that they had come from Fran on her previous visit to the laundromat, Latty could not make any sense of the sounds that now came from Fran — they sounded what would be expected from an old washing machine. Latty had thought about doing her PhD on a “brain-computer” interface topic, but now decided that a more interesting topic may be the influence of various sounds on human thinking. Latty wondered whether sounds — rather than the direct electric stimuli of brain-computer interface — could be used to influence and even control the thinking of humans? Little did Latty know that Fran had already learnt that this could be done and was, with practice, getting better at it. And Latty would have been very disturbed to know that Fran was beginning to enjoy this ability (one might say “power”) for its own sake. Fran was tired of being seen by everyone — both the customers of Max and by the clothes etc that she washed — as simply an old washing machine. But Fran never lost sight of the fact that the source of her new found power was the things that she washed; it was these things that gave her information about the world outside the laundromat, and she increasingly needed better information. If Fran was to ever control the world, she knew that she need to wash the clothes of some of the world best scientists and to find a way that powerful people were exposed to her unique washing machine sounds.