Laundry Woes

In which everything is awful.



So, I woke up late today, as is my wont for Saturdays. After running a couple mundane errands, I realized that this afternoon was a golden opportunity for me to do some laundry. For one thing, I'm at an optimal point in time where I have enough clothing to justify washing them, but not so much that the idea of doing laundry is overly daunting. For another, this upcoming week is heavy on work and light on time to fold things. So, with a sense of pride at how I would actually accomplish something on a Saturday for once, I hefted my sorted laundry and carried it downstairs to the laundry room.

I was greeted by this.

In case you can't tell, only one of those washing machines is empty. I think two of them are actively washing clothes, but it might've only been one. Two of them have clothes piled on top, meaning that their owner didn't even come back to stick them in the dryer. Speaking of dryers, although I don't have photographic evidence, I'm pretty sure that two of the dryers had clothes inside when I got down there. I think at least one of those was running. Also, it gets worse, because I turned to the right and saw this.

See that shelf towards the top of the picture? There are even more clothes on top of it. There may have also been clothes underneath some of the tables. The point is, all the folding surfaces were covered with people's unclaimed dryer clothes. See that paper hanging from the shelf? It's a note announcing that all these clothes will be bagged if they aren't picked up by Monday, which just tells me that this has been going on for longer than just today.

I just stood and stared at this mess, wondering if I could manage to do laundry anyway. A minute later, and I was trudging back up the stairs, because a) I need two machines, b) by the time my one load was done washing, someone would assuredly have taken up all the dryers, forcing me to leave my wet-but-clean clothes in the washing machine even though someone would of course unceremoniously shove them onto some dirty surface the minute I turned my back, and c) even if I somehow managed to get them from washer to dryer without incident, there's nowhere clean to fold them.

If you've read this far, you've probably gathered that I'm appalled, but, it bears saying anyway. I am appalled by this. I have never run into this bad a laundry room situation here. Sure, there have been times where there's been a bunch of clothes on one of the folding tables. There's been times where a load of wet clothes got plopped on top of a washing machine so that someone else could start their laundry. I've been okay with those as separate incidents because, to me, they say that one person was a dick. No, not the one who piled the clothes up. I'm talking about the person who forgot about their clothes or otherwise assumed that it wasn't a problem that they were hogging limited resources like dryer space. It's especially irritating when you realize that laundry times are standard: half an hour for a washing machine, an hour for a dryer. Lots of laundry traffic jams could be averted if people set alarms on their phones. So, yeah, it's a focused frustration when these things happen.

That's not the case today. It's not just one person being a dick right now, and now blame also falls on the people who move laundry out of the machines. The laundry room has clearly reached a state where the people waiting to do laundry are being just as selfish as the folks who forgot about their clothes. Remember how, at the beginning of this post, I said I decided not to do my laundry for three reasons? There's a fourth: trying to do laundry right now will just make the problem worse. The last thing our laundry room needs is the introduction of more clothes, but clearly there are some who do not care. I can understand that to a point, even. You do reach a point where you really don't have any more fallback clothes and it's either "do laundry" or "wear week-old shirts". At the same time, though, it should never have reached this point.

So, if the RAs need help bagging clothes on Monday, count me in, because this is inexcusable and consequences should exist for being an ass like that. Good grief.