For as long as I can remember, doing laundry has been one of my least favorite chores to do around the house. Putting the clothes in the washing machine wasn’t so bad, obviously, and moving them to the dryer was fine, too. What got me away from it was folding my laundry and putting it away in its proper place. Something about the frustration of folding long sleeve shirts, and having my jeans come out damp every single time really wasn’t appealing to me. Aside from that, though, I definitely knew my way around the machines. At my house back home, we have, what I can only imagine to be, one of the most finicky washer and dryer set, I’ve come into contact with in my entire, short life; so, it’s safe to say that I’m familiar with what it takes to get a less-than-perfect machine running—and not overflowing with sudsy, dripping money-down-the-drain. All in all, I know how to do laundry. You’d think that as a college student and now legal adult, I would know how to do the quite basic task of doing laundry, and you’d be right about that. What isn’t right, however, is to assume that every one of my first-year peers would also know this.
The other day, I walked into the first-floor laundry room of Fox, where I typically do my laundry. I knew that it would be pretty busy since I hadn’t planned around the busy peak times of the room as well as I normally do—nonetheless, I had to do laundry, so I proceeded. When I entered the room, I was greeted by the typical musky smell left behind by improper detergent usage, overflowing washing machines, and long-neglected dryer-bound loads now brewing in their own liquid concoctions. This is college.
However, aside from this unfortunately normal scene that I found myself in that day, what I also noticed was scatterings of scent beads on the floor, poking through puddles of detergent and water-like pellets of cereal. I also noticed amalgamations of built-up dryer lint that I could probably use to knit my next sweater—or, you know, set the place on fire. Additionally, two out of the four washing machines that we do have in the little room were filled to near-door level with backed-up water from the previous student’s misuse. Seeing all of these things in the laundry room that day absolutely ticked me off; setting my laundry routine off by over an hour is not necessarily something that makes my day. Yet, after the initial stages of grief that accompanied this setback, I started to look at the problem from an investigative point. Who was doing this? Who, at our big age, still doesn’t know how to do their laundry properly? Not that I’m trying to track them down or anything…but I really just wanted to know how people can mess up something so simple, so badly.
The most inquisitive part of this story is yet to come, however. As I asked around, I spoke with no one, not a single person, who admitted to me that they didn’t know how to do laundry. Everyone that I asked said that they learned how to do laundry before coming to college, and that they’ve been in practice with the process for several months or years now. Keep in mind, I was feeling very passionate about this project, so I did end up asking a lot of people about this. So then, how was it that everyone knew how to do laundry? I know clearly, many people don’t, hence the scene described earlier. This totally scrambled my brain, as I just couldn’t piece together how so many people claimed to know how to do their own laundry, yet all I could see in the Fox laundry room was the opposite.
As for this article and my investigative efforts, I wish that I could give you an answer to this conundrum. Honestly, I wish that at least someone was able to tell me, “No, Sophie. I don’t know how to do my own laundry.” At least I would have an explanation. Still, as of now, I do not. So, if you’re out there reading this and you don’t know how to do your laundry, let it be known that I am looking for you, and please, for my sake and the sake of all of our other classmates and roommates, learn how!
