by Rebecca Dance
Across campus, my laundry situation is probably one of the best. Each floor of Maxey Hall has three mostly functioning washing machines and three mostly functioning driers for a grand total of approximately twelve of each machine. I say approximately because some of them don’t work very well. Sometimes your clothes come out of the washing machine with weird blue stains, and sometimes it takes three cycles to dry your clothes in the driers. Despite these difficulties, the laundry situation isn’t bad if you can do your laundry when nobody else is doing it. It’s almost peaceful then.
Say you want to do your laundry on a Saturday or Sunday, though. It’s the end of the week – you want to make sure that you have the clothes to get through the week. Except everyone else was also thinking the same thing and now getting a washing machine and a drier in the correct order is like waiting for a miracle to happen. Not only are the cycles mismatched (the driers are sixty minutes and the washing machines sit at a meager thirty minutes), but if you don’t time it just right, someone from another floor has come into your laundry room and swiped your machine right out from under you.
That leaves wet laundry just sitting – a lot. And especially as it gets warmer out, this is not the ideal situation. Clothes get musty when they sit for too long in the humidity, and so you might have to wash your clothes again! Keep in mind that every time you do something unexpected with your laundry you’re messing up someone else’s carefully laid plans. It turns into a whole fiasco and then you start to wish that you had just gone to the laundromat down the street.
It’s not all bad. I know of some schools where my friends have to haul the laundry basket into the subway because the laundry building is on a different part of campus on the other side of the city. We also don’t have to pay anything extra for our laundry. It’s a give and take.
