A Laundry Room Etiquette Manifesto (Suzanne)

At JCH, and no doubt in many other forms of student housing, there are communal laundry machines. Two laundry machines, four dryers, and ninety-three students, to be exact. This creates ideal conditions for training negotiators for the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear warfare, for sharing laundry facilities is probably the number one cause of strife in student communities (number two, being, of course, shared bathroom facilities), and gives rise to a number of delicately sticky political situations which require the application of great tact and diplomatic skills to resolve.

My next door neighbour, for example, found his laundry taken out of the dryer, and put on the floor the other day, because some inconsiderate person decided they didn’t want to wait for him to move his stuff himself. As a result, he lost a sock. He was tempted to stop the dryer and dump the offender’s clothes on the floor too, but he refrained, and instead left a strongly-worded Post-It note on the door of the dryer. He believes this will make the offender quake in his boots, or at least think twice about not respecting other peoples’ property rights.

I, too, been a victim of the Laundry Room Offenders. My laundry basket was stolen yesterday. This was a basket I was very sentimentally attached too, having gotten it at great discount from a tacky dollar store in first year O-week. Now, instead of sitting in a pile on my floor next to my laundry basket, my laundry is merely sitting in a pile on the floor. It’s a very sad sight.

All through the year, various notices are put up in the laundry room. From ‘Will someone please return my jeans? Stealing is not cool’, to ‘Please don’t just take things out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer, some of our clothes get ruined when they’re tumble-dried’, to ‘Respect the environment, use a clothes-line’, to ‘If you keep stealing my laundry liquid, I’m going to mix food dye into it so that it comes back to haunt you’, these laundry notices tell you a great deal about the horrible things that go on in this room when nobody’s watching.

All laundry offenders of the world, take heed: your lack of laundry-room etiquette is not appreciated. It’s rude to take people’s clothes out of washing machines and dump them on the floor. It’s rude to put other people’s clothes in the dryer and consequently ruin them. It’s rude to steal people’s underwear, not to mention kind of gross. And it’s rude to hog the machines when you know that there’s a long line for them on a Sunday night. Please, have a little decency and courtesy. It will make the world a better place. And it will mean that I won’t sue you for an action in trespass to goods (which is, in fact, a cause of action perfectly applicable to a case of moved or stolen laundry, although usually a right not worth the effort of enforcement.)

Thank you, and good night.

— Suzanne