Competitive Laundry (For Which I Am Still Grateful)

It looks like a washing machine exploded in our apartment.

Let me explain.

Until Tiffany and I moved into this new building, we had to schlep our laundry once a week--or once every almost-two-weeks if we were feeling dirty--to one of the ubiquitous laundromats in San Francisco. The one we chose was one block down and one block over. Once a man folding his clothes while I was there tried to tell me to invest all my money in gold because the U.S. government was out to get us all and our cash would soon be worthless.

When we were looking for a new place, we had no expectation of a washer and dryer in our building (as renters, of course, we have almost no hope of ever having a washer and dryer in our unit). When we found a place we liked that also had laundry in the scary basement, we were thrilled.

Now, maybe you have laundry and always have and so have no idea how to appreciate this simple luxury. If so, you probably also have a dishwasher, in which case, I hate you. But for us, this was a big perk. Especially since, although this basement is scary and I run the length of its long hall with the weird locked doors when I take out our trash, recycling and compost, it is nowhere near as scary as the little room where our Los Angeles apartment had a pair of washers and dryers. That's because a homeless man sometimes slept in that room and Tiffany once went down with a basket of our clothes to find he had pooped right outside the broken gate.

Anyway, this basement is nothing compared to that. But. This building is bigger than any we've lived in before. There are about 20 units and only one washer and dryer. When I came home from work tonight, I slipped into something more comfortable (a pair of bright green hand-me-down shorts from Tiffany's sister and an orange long-sleeve that my best friend's girlfriend found for me at a thrift store--laundry-doing clothes, of course) and made my way down the treacherous and uneven steps to the laundry room in the basement--only to find that someone's stuff was in the dryer, a pile of wet clothes was on top of the dryer, and another pile of dry clothes was on the folding table.

The washer, however, was open and empty.

Now, I deduced, from the look of the pile on the table that those clothes were waiting for the wash. But there was no one in the room. And, if you're not there, you're not in line. (Okay, so this was totally not good laundry-karma I was putting out there, but Tiffany and I had a back-up of clothes to do because of my out-of-town trip last week.) I put my stuff in... fast, in case anyone came down to claim the washer. The 28-minute timer started.

My mom called and I confessed what I had done.

"I made a laundry mistake," I said.

"What did you do?" she asked, probably remembering the time she tried to teach me how to do laundry in my freshman dorm at BU when we overfilled the machine with soap, bubbles flooded the room and we had to call the custodian.

"I cut the line," I said.

She agreed I had probably overstepped.

29 minutes later, I went back down. Someone had taken my stuff out of the washer and put it on the table where the first pile of dry clothes still remained. The dryer was still running with the wet clothes still on top.

It was obviously a very competitive laundry night.

Now, I'm no quitter. But I quit. I wasn't going to trudge up and down the stairs hoping to catch the dryer empty and beat someone else in. Instead, I unfolded our drying rack next to our open windows and hung all of our clothes on it... and our bookshelf and our blue wooden chair.

Almost makes me miss the laundromat down the street... even with its conspiracy theorists.