Doing Laundry is FUN!

Yesterday was the last day of classes before spring break (yes I know it’s not spring here—they schedule spring break at the end of February so we can go enjoy spring somewhere else). I had one paper to write, one meeting to attend, and one load of laundry to do before I could go enjoy my weekend, and I had my day planned pretty nicely. I would get up, put my whites in the washing machine downstairs, run a few miles, come back and put my laundry in the dryer, shower and get ready, retrieve my laundry, and head up to campus with enough time to finish my paper before my 2:00 meeting. But when I went downstairs I found someone’s load of wet laundry in a laundry basket in the middle of the floor, the washing machine full of tepid water, and a yellow post-it note hung over the edge reading:

This machine is broken! (It was smoking when I came in.) –Joe, #1

This was certainly inconvenient, but I could manage. I still had enough whites to get me through to one more day, and figured it couldn’t take that long to repair a washing machine. And with only one washing machine in the building, it seemed urgent enough that maintenance was sure to get right on it. So I went running, went to campus, finished my paper, attended my meeting, came home, and found the same state of events downstairs. It occurred to me that maybe I should call maintenance, just in case Joe in #1 had not. But I had groceries to buy and a dinner to attend and a game night afterwards, and why wouldn’t Joe in #1 call maintenance if the washing machine had been smoking?

But if he had called, they were taking their time to respond, and by Saturday morning when I trudged back downstairs to check out the state of the laundry room before hauling my basket down, the wet laundry was gone but the waterlogged machine and handwritten note were still just as they had been the morning before.

Now this was a problem. I was officially out of whites, and after my morning run I was going to need something to change into. And it was Saturday, which (I know from past experience) would make it really hard to get a hold of maintenance. But the problem wasn’t unsolvable – there are two other buildings in our little complex and I figured I would just go use one of their washing machines. I pulled on my boots and walked over to the next building to check things out, but instead of a laundry room on the basement floor, I found a storage room. Maybe the apartments in this section of the building all have their own washing machines, I thought, and proceeded to the next and final building. Fortunately there was a washer and dryer where I thought they should be, and no one was using it. I hurried back to my apartment for a dollar’s worth of quarters, my laundry detergent, and my laundry basket, then lugged it all back across the parking lot.

But of course it wasn’t as easy as that. When I got there I saw that this machine, though operated by the same management and identical to the machine in my own building, cost $1.75 a load instead of $1.00. And when I opened the washing machine, I found a half inch of bluish water in the bottom. I did not know what this meant, but it didn’t look good. I stared at the water and deliberated for a moment. As I saw it, I had three options:

1. Try to get by without laundry until the machine was repaired (the most hygienically undesirable option).
   
2. Go to the laundromat.
   
3. Pay the extra $.75 and take a chance with the machine.

This was not a hard choice. I didn’t know where a laundromat might be located, didn’t want to drive there, didn’t want to sit in the laundromat for as long as it would take to do my laundry, and didn’t want to put off my run until midafternoon just so I could have something to wear when I got out of the shower. So I ran back to my apartment for three more quarters and took my chances.

You, as the reader, know better than I did at that point that this story is not going anywhere good. Twenty-four minutes later I returned to the laundry room with four more quarters and a dryer sheet, opened the washing machine, and found it overflowing with suds, my whites swimming in a good six or seven inches of hot water. I stood at a loss for what to do next, and out of the corner of my eye caught a glimpse of a small yellow piece of paper on the ground, in the narrow space between the machine and the wall. It was a post-it note that had fallen off the machine. It read:

This machine is overloaded and is not working. It was smoking and making a horrible noise so I turned it off. It might need maintenance.

Might need maintenance indeed. What in the world are the chances that both washing machines in a single apartment complex will start smoking and cease functioning properly on the same weekend? Sure, I sort of brought this on myself by ignoring the bluish water in the bottom of the machine, but still. After a moment’s thought, I began fishing my laundry out of the water and dropping the sopping clothing into my plastic laundry basket, scalding my fingers in the process. One of the first pieces of clothing I retrieved was my Provo Canyon Half Marathon t-shirt, which had turned a lovely, even shade of baby blue, and my heart about stopped at the thought that that half inch of blue water at the bottom of the machine may not have been colored blue from laundry detergent, as I’d previously thought. I fished out another piece of laundry, but to my relief it, and everything else, was still white. (How one piece of laundry managed to change color so drastically when everything else was just fine is still a mystery to me.)

After extracting about half my laundry from the hot water I had reached my limits. The water was too soapy for me to see what was left, and I couldn’t keep my hand in the water long enough to retrieve anything that wasn’t floating up near the top. I went back to my apartment once again and got a coat hanger, then used it to hook socks and underwear and sports bras, and when a few successive dips in the water failed to bring up anything new, I swirled the hanger around a few times to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, and then turned my attention to the laundry basket, where a small pool of water had accumulated in the bottom. I closed the lid on my basket and turned it on its side to allow the water to escape through the ventilation holes. Then I dragged the heavy basket of still-waterlogged clothing back to the shower in my apartment. I awkwardly tilted the basket under the faucet, turned the water to lukewarm, and tried as best I could to rinse out all the soap, then tipped the basket in the tub to drain it once again and dragged it downstairs to the dryer that was, fortunately, still in working order. Before I left for a run about half an hour later I fed the machine a few extra quarters to make sure the dripping laundry would be thoroughly dry by the time I came back.

And that is the gratefully anticlimactic end of my laundry saga. Towels and sheets, which I almost always wash on Saturdays, are going to have to wait this week because I’m not willing to sacrifice another $3.25, three hours, and the skin on my hands when I have a second set of clean towels and sheets folded neatly in my closet anyway.

And I just might give maintenance a call and leave a message because I’ve learned that if you assume someone’s already taken care of something, chances are pretty good that everyone else is assuming the same thing.