12:54am and I just finished everything I had to do today. It doesn’t help that I slept until 11:30am and then fell asleep again from 2 to 4, but hey, at least I’m done. I even have half an hour before I have to go to sleep if I want to sleep eight hours tonight!
I would have been done about an hour ago if it hadn’t been for my stupid little Laundry Adventure.
Probably around 9:30pm, I took a load of laundry to the laundry room on the fifth floor, since all the washing machines on my floor (I live on the fourth floor) were in use. I stuck my clothes in a machine, swiped my card, and had $1.25 charged to my account, the price of a wash. I then went to choose a cycle on my machine and found that it was requesting an additional 25 cents before it would start. Of course, the swiping mechanism thought the machine was in use, so I couldn’t have it take the 25 cents off my card. Cool.
I went back to my room, grabbed a dollar bill, went to the ground floor to get quarters from the change machine in the lobby, went back up to the fifth floor, and put a quarter in the machine. Repeatedly. Rejected every time. All four of my quarters, rejected every time. What…
SO I went back to my room, grabbed my empty laundry bag and detergent, went back to the fifth-floor laundry room, loaded up my bag with my still-dirty clothes, and took it all down to the third-floor laundry. I put my clothes in a machine, swiped my card, started the machine… yay!!
A half hour later and the laundry is done. Well… I go down to the laundry room, open the machine, and all my clothes are dry. I thought maybe the load was just too big for the water to have reached everything, but NOPE. ALL the clothes were dry. It’s then that I notice the machine my clothes were in had never been started. I payed for and ran the empty machine next to my own.
Oh, life.
As you can guess, I finally started the right machine, washed my clothes, dried my clothes, and now they are comfortably all put away. I look forward to doing this again tomorrow with my other loads.
Sounds like life indeed… This kept happening at my school for a while – half of our id cards didn’t work on the card swipe and you always had to bring down more quarters than you needed because some machines were picky. And then the school replaced all of the machines, and then everything is working as far as I know. So basically, your school probably needs to replace a couple machines.
Wow… this is one of those peculiar Americanisms I’ve always been fascinated by. We have laundrettes here, but I think they’re mostly used by people whose machines are on the fritz, or who have something really dirty or too big for the machine. It would seem to take half the fun out of doing washing – do you get to choose your own laundry detergent, or is that part of the deal??
Actually, I only use a communal laundry room because I live in a dorm at uni. Generally people have their own washers and driers, except in certain flats, like my mom’s, where she has to share with the rest of her building. I would much rather have my own laundry room.
And yep, I use my own detergent! Nothing except the machines is provided for us.