Today is laundry day. Since moving into my apartment, I love laundry day. The laundry room is big and there are always tons of open washers and it feels good to throw everything in and go upstairs to read Glamour and while away 30 minutes doing nothing in particular.
But when I went down to change my laundry (maybe 20 minutes late after I got distracted by a very nice Glamour article calling for the end of women making bitchy comments about each others' weight), I found a note on top of my washers that said "please don't be inconsiderate, pick up wash when done." Talk about passive aggressive.
Now, after 4 years of college I understand the need for prompt clothing pick-up, and I've always hated going to the laundry room and finding every washer occupied by someone else's finished laundry. This is maybe the latest I have ever been in going to unload the washer, as my time at Grinnell has taught me that if you leave your laundry in a washer for more than 2 seconds after it ends, you will find it sitting in a puddle of detergent on top of the washer.
But seriously, this person has no idea what I was doing or why I was late. I could have been cooking, or making an important phone call, or dead! I could be in a wheelchair and therefore having difficulty moving in and out of my apartment. For all they know, I could have misread the timer, or my watch, and made a perfectly honest mistake. They don't know my perfect history of laundry removal. Really, unless this person was hanging out in the laundry room for 20 minutes watching my washers in particular, they don't actually know how long my laundry was sitting there to begin with. I consider anywhere up to 10 minutes to be a perfectly reasonable buffer time (especially in a laundry room with many open washers), because people do lose track of time. And if you're writing a note because you've been watching someone's clothes sit there for ten minutes, a washer has probably opened up in the meantime and you're just an idiot anyway.
Not to mention that I'm pretty sure there were at least 2 washers open at any one time while I was not in that laundry room. There were at least 7 open when I got there, and maybe 10 or 12 when I left. If you have more than 2 washer loads of laundry, you can't be bitching at other people for taking up too many washers.
So, mysterious note-leaver, I defy your attempts to make me feel guilty for being late. If you can't handle the laundry habits of others, don't use a laundry room that is shared among several hundred people.
Bitch, you don't know my life!
