problem solved!

I finally had enough. Even after cleaning my washing machine as thoroughly as possible, I still had stinky clothing at the end of every wash. Frustrating. Infuriating. At a guess, the problem was the skanky water that flowed into the machine. The time had come to go vigilante, which meant taking some risks.

Odor comes primarily from bacteria; the washer has been failing to perform its one and only duty, which is to clean my clothes. If the clothes are coming out stinky, then they're not clean. When I heat up and sweat in my now-dry-but-still-unclean clothes, I amplify that stink and become a nuisance to my coworkers. The bacteria must die, which is something that can be accomplished through the blistering heat of a clothes dryer, a crucial piece of equipment that I don't have, and haven't used in years, mainly because most Koreans believe in hang-drying their clothing, an action that utterly fails to prevent odors.

If you can't do autoclave sterilization, you go chemical. So I decided to risk dumping a tiny bit of bleach into the wash: a small capful of bleach diluted in about 900 cc of water, poured into the machine during the rinse cycle.

Result: problem mostly solved. There was no fading or loss of color, which was the very thing I was trying to avoid when I elected to dilute the bleach. But when I pulled the clothes out of the washer and handled them, I noticed that my fingertips no longer acquired that vaguely musty stench, even after I had handled the entire load. Well, to be honest, there was the tiniest whiff of wrongness, but it was hard to detect. I might try 1.5 capfuls of bleach next time. Just like nuking a site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.