“College is more than just going to class” - I’m sure you’ve heard this bit of wisdom more times than you can count.
...And it’s true! Although courses are important, most of the education process happens outside of the classroom: maintaining friendships, living on your own and learning to tolerate people with different viewpoints are all essential experiences for young people to have.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in campus laundry rooms. As any student can tell you, doing a load of laundry in a college dorm is one of the formidable challenges of growing up. Surely even non-students can imagine the struggle at hand: five machines - sometimes fewer - shared between hundreds of stressed-out, sexually-frustrated young people. It’s truly a wonder that such a system can function at all.
(Even a successful laundry run can end with anger and despair.)
Lucky for students everywhere, there are people like me to solve mundane problems such as these. As a third-year SUNY student, I have taken numerous courses in philosophy and ethics and have spent inordinate amounts of time dealing with my campus’ student government. As such, I believe that I possess the patience and moral sensibilities that are required to solve the problems that plague the campus laundry room.
Here are my three guidelines for a pleasant and violence-free laundry experience. They based on utilitarian principles as well as common decency.
1. One machine per person.
(I figured this one would be upsetting to a lot of people, so I decided to get it out of the way first.)
One of the primary sources of laundry room anger is the selfish and deplorable practice of using multiple machines for one load of laundry. Many offenders will justify their actions with petty excuses. We’ve heard them all before: “I had too much laundry for one washer!” or “I need to separate my whites from my colors!” These arguments are all, obviously, absurd. Oftentimes these people will point to the various warning labels on the washing machines, which advise “not to overfill,” and conclude that their actions are necessary for safety reasons. Of course, they ignore the fact that these labels were put in place by former offenders in an attempt to save face. The washing machines themselves actually don't care at all!
In my humble opinion, each washing machine should be packed with the maximum amount of clothing that it can fit. Any damage or flooding that follows is probably pure coincidence.
2. Removing other peoples’ laundry is more than just acceptable; it’s a moral obligation.
(Thanks to good laundry room citizens like myself, this person's clean clothes are on top of the washing machine where the belong.)
Those of you who are squeamish about having your clothes touched should probably just stop reading now.
Even now, in 2015, the idea of taking strangers’ clothes out a washing machine is vile and repulsive to many college students. What’s more, people on the correct side of this issue are often made to feel self-conscious about doing the right thing. Even after three years of college experience, I still feel the need to awkwardly shuffle out of the laundry room after taking somebody’s clothes out. Given the scarcity of machines in the dorms, it’s actually more of a crime to let a person’s clothes sit idly in an otherwise-usable machine.
To raise awareness of this issue, I try to make a point of taking peoples’ clothes out whenever I can. Sometimes I will wait in the laundry room for hours on end, waiting to empty the machines as soon as their cycles are finished. In fact, I do this even when I have no laundry of my own to wash. For me, it’s about sending a message. It’s about breaking the taboo and changing campus life for the better.
3. ALWAYS put other peoples’ clothing in the dryer.
This one may come as a surprise to some of the laundry room veterans out there.
Conventional wisdom teaches us that the laundry room is a dog-eat-dog world and that we should always put our own interests first. After all, everyone else is usually doing the same.
But what many of you might not realize is that putting a stranger’s wet laundry in the dryer actually benefits the entire laundry room community. Idle machines are bad for everybody, so it’s best to get those clothes through the dryer ASAP. Chances are you've been in the laundry room for at least a couple of hours, so what’s a few extra seconds?
As usual, certain (negative, backwards-thinking, horrible) people will criticize you for doing this. “You shrank all my clothes!” they’ll say. “I had no idea where my clothes went!” is another common complaint. Nonsense. Nonsense, I say! If people are so concerned about their clothes shrinking, then maybe they should invest in a clothing stretcher. I mean, really, do people not know about these? Or they could just buy larger sizes, for crying out loud! Whichever way you want to look at this, people drying each others' clothing is certainly not the problem.
(Sometimes, it takes courage to do the right thing.)
As with any great code of ethics, I’m sure that this one will attract scores of critics and naysayers (all of them laundry-room-abusers, no doubt). Many will say that there are betters ways to fix the laundry situation: washers that don’t lock our clothes in for the entire cycle, dryers that don’t double as ovens, a general sense of personal responsibility for taking our laundry out on time… the list goes on. Some people may even suggest that the campus should install more washing machines in order to accommodate the growing student population. Clearly all of these are preposterous solutions that will do nothing to improve the situation. I urge you all to follow my principles instead. Together, we can make the laundry room a better place for the next generation of students.
