My ex-boyfriend was a real slug, and always forgot his laundry in the dryer for days. Normally it would not bother me what he did with his clothes, but after a week of having the washer or dryer stuffed with debris, it became a bit of an obstacle to others. So, our roommates frequently sent me, ‘Hey I need to use the dryer but it's been full for a while’ texts, and I often found myself in the similar situation of opening the washing machine to an annoying surprise. Eventually, after countless attempts of begging him to eliminate the obstacle of his laundry – not even requesting for it to be clean or folded, just out of the way – which he neglected to do, I started removing it myself. I would pile it up on the table next to the hot water tank, where the stack of partially washed clothes slowly grew and grew into a full-scale laundry mountain. I honestly still can not comprehend how his wardrobe sufficed to continue clothing him while the mound in our basement rivaled the size of my own closet. Anyway, I started transporting the clothing from the basement to the back of his car, and got away with it too for almost a month, until he finally asked me, ‘What are you doing with my stuff?’ To which I had no choice but to answer, ‘Trying to get it out of my house.’ We broke up within a week.
Grace Brown
As someone that has about three outfit changes a day, I do laundry pretty frequently. Last year, living in Bosch, it was devastating lugging everything down to the basement just to see every machine filled with other people’s clothes. At the time, my non-confrontational self was mortified at the thought of moving someone's clothes out of the dryer even if they’ve been sitting there for days. So, I’d go back and forth, checking on the machines like a mad woman until it was the right moment to do my washing. I cannot begin to describe how luxurious it feels living in Dugan and taking just a short stroll down the hall to do my laundry twice a week. Because of how often I do my laundry, I do not have the time to wait around for someone to move their stale, day-old clothes out of the dryer. About a week or two into this semester, I was feeling bold and moved someones clothes out of a dryer and onto an open table. I was instantaneously overcome with guilt and kept imagining the owner of these clothes putting a hit out on me for tampering with their laundry routine. The stress of this was too much for me and I’ve since gone back to doing laundry just once a week like a normal person.
Ava C. Green
Unlike most people, I barely have enough clothes to get me through the week. Meaning, bad things happen when I don’t do laundry regularly. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember, including Freshman year when I lived on Bosch 4. Despite the fact that it was 2016 and everyone had smartphones, no one seemed capable of setting a timer on their phone, so some other students on my floor left the washers and/or dryers occupied for extensive periods of time. Obviously, this meant I had no choice but to switch the laundry for them, in order to productively continue about my day. I should also mention I did not take any of the actual articles of clothing into consideration when selecting a heat setting, as I was pretty sheltered from clothings’ needs. This eventually led to me being on the receiving end of an unpleasant lecture from a group of women whose clothes I had partially ruined by using a setting that was too hot. Needless to say, I learned my lesson. I started doing laundry at 6:30am to make sure I was in and out before everyone else woke up. I was never going to remember which heat setting is the correct one to use, anyway.
Miguel Valencia, ‘20
Laundry in college isn’t usually too much of a struggle for me, as I tend to do it during the weekdays when everyone is in class. But my biggest pet peeve is when people don’t take out and empty the lint catcher in the dryer. Sometimes I go and empty it before my load and there will be like a quarter inch of fuzz and dirt just piled on there. Honestly I’m surprised that there aren’t more cases of dryer fires on college campuses. So if you’re reading this, and don’t empty the lint catcher before you put your clothes in the dryer, please take the extra 5 seconds and do this one favor for everyone around you.
Sara Umbrell
Freshman year was the first time I was in charge of only my laundry and I was practically drunk with that power. I did four different loads at least once a week: lights, colors, darks, and towels. I used the app that the dorms have advertised to keep track of when my clothes are done, and I’d rush down to the laundry room to make sure my stuff didn’t get thrown onto a table. I have an irrational fear of germs so if my clothes were to end up there, I’d have to rewash the entire load. I wasn’t afraid to move other people’s stuff out of the way but it still felt mean. So, if it was still there when I was done with the washer, I’d put it back in. But if I took clothes out of the dryer to fit mine in, I’d fold the laundry and neatly place it on the table. So if you did laundry in Bosch during the Fall 2020 semester and one day your clothes ended up being folded before you got down there, you’re welcome.
Marissa Burr
Let me start off by saying that the Frisch laundry room is totally chaotic. You better cross your fingers on your elevator ride down, because the chances you’ll get an open, working machine is quite slim. This past Tuesday around 6:00pm, I took my bag down to the laundry room and threw my first load into the last open machine, just like I always do. When I came back and opened up the machine, I picked up the most oversaturated, water-logged pajama shirt I had ever seen. I guess there was a reason this machine was the only one open, because my clothes were COMPLETELY drenched. Panicking, I threw all my clothing into the laundry bag and transferred them to the dryer to see if that would do anything. Of course, it just made all the clothes very hot, but they remained soaked. As an inexperienced college freshman does, I called my mom to see if she would have a solution. She told me to run the clothes through another wash cycle because the problem seemed to be that the washer never rang out the water. My only problem was that all the machines were now taken. I spent the rest of my night wringing out my wet clothes and running them in the dryer, since there was nothing else I could do. Around 9:00 p.m. I surrendered and took my wet clothes back to my dorm to hang on my drying rack. By morning, they were still damp, so after class I ran them through the dryer again, and everything finally dried out. So if there is anything to learn here, it’s that the only empty washing machine is probably busted. Take your own gamble picking out a functioning washer.
Sophie Asher
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