I live in a building with 7 stories of apartments with about 20 units on each floor. The building was built with 4 laundry rooms but only 1 is now functional. This leaves us all sharing 2 washing machines and 2 dryers. Definitely not ideal.
A few days ago, it came time to start wearing clean clothes again; so I convinced myself to do some laundry (aka, I was told to by Cherie. I would consider it whipped but I don't work yet and she does all day). I went down there on Tuesday morning around 10:00 am and as I suspected, all the machines were free. I paused for a moment to decide which machine to use, as I am not usually so lucky to have a choice. I chose the machine closest to the dryers to make transfer easier; this would be my first mistake and the point where my luck would go downhill.
As I loaded my laundry into the machine, someone else came in and began to fill the other machine and we exchanged smiles. When I put the 3 dollars in the coin slider, I quickly found that the mechanism was broken and I could not pay for the machine (let alone get it to work). I figured I would just wait for the other machine to free up. I came down about when I thought it would be finished and it wasn't. I checked in every 15-30 minutes and sure enough, he was one of those people that leaves their clothes in the machine for ages. (There is a special Maytag in hell waiting for people who do this) Of course I considered just moving his laundry into the dryer, but I don't like touching random peoples things nor would I like it if someone did that to me, so I didn't.
Eventually, on one of my trips down to the laundry room, I found that he no longer occupied the washer; the problem was that somebody else had much better timing and was now using it. This went on until about 8:30 pm when i finally got my clothes into the machine. If nothing else, at least I knew that that machine worked. So I started it and came back about 40 minutes later to see that it had finished. Unfortunately, the machine broke during my cycle.
 |
| Laundry machine still full of water |
As far as I know, it finished washing the clothes since I didn't smell any soap in it; but the real issue is that the water didn't drain. So I spent the next 15 minutes wringing out all my clothes and towels. Then I sat with the lady who used the machine just before me (and occupied both dryers) waiting for her to finish. By 9:00pm, I was cleaning out the lint trap (something that nobody else seems to do) and using my last 3 dollars to dry my clothes. When I came down at 10 pm to collect my toasty warm clothes, I found a still soggy pile laundry. With a sigh, I put it all in the laundry basket and left it in the apartment until the next morning when I could go to the bank for more coins to finally dry them.
Basically, this experience has left me hating laundry just a little bit more.
Of course, this isn't the first time that the laundry gods have taken a dump on me. My first year at Cal Poly, somebody took my clothes out of my dryer, dumped them on the floor and used the rest of my cycle to dry their clothes. I have been fortunate enough to have only had a couple places where I was forced to use common laundry facilities. If I recall correctly, Stephen had a similar incident happen to him.
If you should take anything at all from this, it's as follows:
- Don't leave your clothes in a common machine for any extensive period of time.
- Clean out the lint trap. It shouldn't matter if other people don't do it if you do every time anyway, but it's annoying the one time you forget and it is so full that the dryer does nothing for your clothes. Plus it's annoying having to wait for you to use two cycles just because you didn't clean the lint trap the first time.
- If the machine is broken, LEAVE A SIGN ON IT.
- If you must dump my laundry somewhere, do it somewhere clean.
- Don't smoke in the laundry room
- And most importantly, don't do anything else that pisses me off.
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