October 10, 2003

Death to Dryers!

There hasn't been a bad laundromat incident in almost seven months now. Last spring I had a series of awful experiences at laundromats, such as this one, this one, and this one. The main reason for the lack of bad experiences is that I moved to Unit 3 in May and have been doing laundry at the relatively sheltered Unit 3 laundry facility ever since then, which is not frequented by bums as is the University Ave. Laundromat. Nevertheless, I have learned a new sort of pain and come to the conclusion that I will never be able to complete a load of laundry without something bad happening.

I had a lot of laundry to do tonight because I decided to hold out until I completely ran out of clothes. For some reason, I haven't been able to find a night at Unit 3 recently where it isn't completely jam packed in the laundry room, so my schedule has been thrown off. I thought I was pretty clever holding out until Wednesday night to do laundry, but then when I went to do it last night, all machines were taken and so after waiting around ten minutes for one of them to open up, I just gave up and went back. Tonight, I found machines and started laundry. Everything was going to be fine, except when I came down around 1 am to pick up my laundry, I found that one of my dryers was open and that the time had expired. What the hell? I felt the clothes in the dryer and they were soaked. DAMMIT! Some asshole must have opened up the dryer and then left it like that. This meant that I had to stay up later to wait until my laundry was done. I was all ready very tired, so the prospect of waiting around to finish laundry was not appealing.

I swiped my card and turned on the dryer, and was about to leave, when I looked back, and noticed the door open. What!? The door had POPPED OPEN BY ITSELF. My reaction was this: I cannot believe this! I have to stay up another HOUR waiting around for my clothes to dry, waste another dollar, and be worried that at any time, the dryer might POP open and not dry my clothes a second time around? I guess I could have waited around holding the door in place, but I decided to come upstairs and write this instead. I guess the plain old truth is that laundromats and I have never gotten along and will probably never get along. Guess I just have to wait until I have laundry capabilities in my own house.