Dirty Laundry

I love living in the student housing at the U of U.  It really is great to walk outside and see a ton of kids running around playing and riding their bikes.  Even better is when all the bikes are laying around on the ground at the end of the day when kids have all gone inside for the night.  Highly reminiscent of home in a strangely positive way, and kind of therapeudic when you're really homesick. 

Unfortunately with living in student housing, it means you live the life of a student.  And that includes the "on sight laundry facility".  For 24 apartments there are 2 washers and 3 dryers.  I didn't really have a problem with "sharing" a laundry facility until I got here.  Sure, I've complained about how gross the laundry room was at our old apartment, but never getting a chance to get one load done is reminscent of home in a not-so-positive way.

What makes things worse is that people just leave their stuff in the washers and dryers.  I'm sorry, but don't get upset if you leave your stuff in a shared washer or dryer forever and come back to find it in a pile on top of the washer.  The laundry room hours are from 8am to 10 pm, and I work full time, not enough time left over in my day to finish 4 loads of laundry.  That leaves me one day a week that I am able to do my laundry, and I'd rather not spend the entire day getting it done. 

Today was especially rediculous.  When I got to the laundry room I waited a good 15 minutes before the person came in to put her wet laundry in the dryers.  Then she got all huffy at me because I had the nerve to have to do laundry at the same time as her. How dare I?  So to be "fair to me" she said I can use one of the washers while she uses the other.  The catch, she already had stuff in ALL of the dryers and just left everything in there, so when it was time for me to dry my clothes I had to remove her stuff. I was nice enough to only dump her things out of one dryer. By the time I had finished washing and drying 4 loads of laundry, one at a time, her things were still sitting in the other washer and dryers.  Nothing had been moved since the first time I walked in this morning.  SO FRUSTRATING!  I had a million things to get done today, on my day off, but I had to sacrifice doing a lot of it so that this girl can leave her stuff all over the place, and be a brat about it at the same time.

There needs to be a rule against this type of behavior.  My suggestion:  Laundry Jail.  If you leave your stuff in the washer or dyer for more than 15 minutes after it is done, it goes into Laundry Jail and you have to pay a fine to get it out.  And too bad if it's all wet and smells like mildew, you get to pay to rewash your clothes, too.  This isn't your Mom and Dad's house where you can go out to lunch and run errands between loads of laundry.  You leave it, I WILL move it.  And I won't even feel bad if it gets wrinkled.