WORST. LAUNDRY DAY. EVER.

or,

THE CASE FOR A CLOTHING-OPTIONAL SOCIETY

The truth of the matter is I'd put off doing my laundry for too long. But then, there's a good excuse for why I didn't get it all done last week — of the six washing machines in the basement of my building, four were broken. But they break and get repaired on a fairly regular basis. And it's pretty critical I get at least one load done this evening — as of today I have no clean work clothes, and tomorrow there's a political blogger conference at GWU.

So of course when I get downstairs there's now just one machine working. But that's okay. I've brought with me one load of my most presentable collared shirts and all of my jeans and slacks, and into the washing machine they go, followed by the liquid detergent. I put my card into the slot, which has just enough money left for one cycle of the washer and dryer each.


But immediately, the electronic readout starts spitting back gibberish — the same gibberish I'd seen on the other machines last week. I press the buttons again. The machine doesn't start — but it does eat the last of my money. My lucky day, huh? Trust me, it gets better.

My only decent clothes are now covered with soapy blue goop in this metal cylinder in my basement. I have no extra cash to add to the card, and the nearest laundromat is blocks away — if it's even still open (it's in a strip mall that's being slowly vacated in advance of demolition). So I do what comes natural. I scream four-letter words at the top of my lungs and kick the washing machine. It takes several tries before I give myself a slight headache and cause a bit of cosmetic damage. So that kind of rules out going to the front office with my complaints — as if it was worth trying to haggle over $2.75.


I head back upstairs, grab a plastic garbage bag, return to the laundry room, fill it with my clothes -- and into the bathtub they go. I fill it with hot water, use a mop handle to make the water churn, and then I drain the tub while running the shower. And then I repeat. And repeat.


In between, I walk to the BP a block away to take money out of the ATM and break it into smaller bills by buying food I didn't want. And return: Fill tub, drain with shower running, repeat. It's a lot harder to get all the soap suds out than I'd thought, and in the end I had to call it good enough.



So I spend ten minutes wringing as much water as I can out of everything (socks, easy; jeans, not so easy). I load it all into my laundry basket — now about three times as heavy as before, and take it back downstairs.

What's the first thing I see? Somebody has a load of laundry running in my machine. You know, the one that I kicked in?


Maybe I will go ask for my money — and it won't be $2.75, either. That's because I load my sopping wet laundry into the dryer, insert card (now $10 more valuable) and... damned thing won't turn on. That's $4.25 they owe me now. I try the dryer one over, willing to spend the money just to find out -- and lo and behold, this one works. Of course, because the torque created by my arms isn't up to the centrifugal forces of the average spin cycle, I've got to run it for 90 minutes. And that's where my clothes are now — tumbling away until 11 o'clock tonight.

So in the end, everything looks like everything's going to work out; call it a lose-lose-lose-win situation. If nothing else I'll at least have some clean clothes by tomorrow — and this lousy blog post.

P.S. It's actually been a worse day than just this, but at least this one I can laugh about. I mean, later.

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posted by WWB at 10:05 PM |