The nuisance that is laun-der-ee

It has officially been more than 24 hours ever since I began doing my laundry! Some forty tees, twenty dress-shirts, two towels, two bed sheets, two pillow-covers, a pillow, and various jeans and trousers. I divided the load among four washing machines, which took two hours to find, because one of the vending machines that accepted coins for 5-6 machines was full. I called the resident assistant but he told me the management can't empty it before Monday morning. All the other washing machines were occupied.

I separated the dark-coloured clothes that I thought might have the potential to colour all my clothes, but none of them did. Some blue piece of clothing in one of the other washers, however, did colour all the clothes I had in that particular machine. So now I have a collection of white-turned-blue shirts as well as socks etc. Not to mention my favourite pair of brown-coloured Dockers that looks like blue paint was spattered all over it.

One of the washing machines didn't drain the water properly, so I had to squeeze the water out one cloth at a time.

Out of the eight dryers, only six were working, and all of them were occupied. One unsaid laundry rule is that if a washer/dryer is done washing/drying and the person hasn't collected it, you can take the clothes out and put yours in. But what if you can see women's undergarments inside? It would just be weird to take them out yourself. I considered asking one of the girls to do that for me, but I realised that would be even more weird. So I just hung around and hoped someone will come and collect their laundry.

Another unsaid rule for PGP dryers in particular, since they suck so bad, is to divide one washing machine's load between two dryers to esnure drying. For this laundry session, it would mean using all eight dryers.

I went back to the Residence 3 laundry room a few hours later around 4 am and finally found four machines that were free. I should mention, by now I had spent $2 on washing. I filled the dryers as much as I could, because I was running out of 20-cent coins, and an hour later when I checked back, they were all still wet. So I gave them all another round.

By this time I was sleepy as hell, so I just dosed off. I checked the laundry room first thing after waking up and getting a chocolate-cheese waffle, and the load from three dryers was done. One load was still wet [the one from the washer that didn't drain the water]. So I restarted its cycle and added the remaining load to two other dryers. I haven't checked back ever since because I feel sick, but it's about to be 2 am now and I hope when I go to check my clothes they are all dry. Otherwise they will have to wait until early morning when I can get hold of 20-cent coins.

If you have read this post all up to this point, I praise you for having nothing better to do in life. Or maybe you are frustrated by doing your laundry as well and can relate to my experience. I have spent $7 by now and I need wishes and prayers from people for the next time I do my laundry. Laundry sucks.

How come they haven't invented stay-clean-forever clothes by now? Scientists work on the most useless of inventions [like cloning] but when it comes to "real-world issues" such as this, they digress.