Saturday, March 13, 2010

Laundry day

When you live in an apartment building, you do several loads of laundry at a time, right? Why would you ever just do one? I tend to save up my laundry and hope there are enough machines for me to do three or four loads at once.

There are six washers and seven dryers in my building.

When I went down today with three loads (one light, one dark and one for my duvet cover), there was another woman who also had three loads. All six machines were free, so we took them over. No problem.

A half hour later I went back down to switch the loads and discovered that the other woman had got there a split second before I had. I then discovered that two dryers were broken. She immediately loaded three smallish loads into three dryers while I sadly stuffed all of my clothes into one dryer.

As I hinted to her that it was possible to put two loads worth in one dryer, and that I still needed to dry my duvet cover, she realized that one of her dryers was, too, broken and gave me a look that suggested she expected me to forfeit my one working dryer.

When she realized that there was no way I was going to give up my one dryer, she pulled out some freshly clean clothes from another dryer that had just finished and tossed them on the (very dirty) table.

My duvet cover is now air drying in my very tiny apartment. I have no idea how long this will take.

The polite thing would have been for her to split her three loads into two dryers, so that I could do the same, right?

Sometimes I really hate this city.