If I came back to find that my laundry had been taken out of a machine because I’d been late picking it up I’d feel like I owe the person who had to move my shit an apology, not the other way around.
I voted B.
However, 5 minutes is cutting things a little fine. 10 minutes is a little more reasonable, I think. Still, there’s no way of telling when the other person is going to come back.
If there’s only a single washer and dryer for the entire floor, a considerate neighbor would set a timer of some sort–and would probably apologize for causing any inconvenience. An inconsiderate neighbor…well they could care less, and they would also tend to be offended by having their clothes moved.
I ageed with Tenant B; you really do need to be polite to your fellow tenants and take your laundry out as soon as you can after it’s finished.
My first communal laundry experience was in my freshman year dormitory-- if you didn’t stay and watch your clothes, other students would often empty your washer/dryer mid-cycle and fill it with their own stuff. Later on, I ran laundry in apartment complexes with shared machines; I’d keep a timer on so I knew how long it had been going, and promptly removed the laundry when the timer went off. Never had any issues with theft, my clothes being taken out of the washer/dryer, or pissing off my neighbors. (There was, however, one disgusting tenant in the complex who kept washing clothes with copious amounts of feces in them-- it’d be smeared all over the inside of the washer they used. It got so bad that I bought HE washing soap and used the HE machines instead-- they were faster, and Fecal Tenant was too cheap to pay for the extra quarter per load.)
But, what about your thicks?
When the wash is done, it’s fair game. You are obligated to put them in the basket, (no fair not leaving the basket - in that case they get put wherever!) If it is critical to you that they not be touched, then be stay there while the wash is running.
I never touch anyone’s clothes, because then YOUR clothes become subject for retaliation. A little bleach by tenant A in the dark colors, or simply opening the dryer door so the time does go down but nothing is being dried.
I vote for B. In my apartment building, I sometimes find a load of clothes that have been left in the washing machine so long that they either start to smell moldy or they are dried out in place. (At that point, you’d have to rewash them.) I hate that, especially since the moldiness tends to linger in the machine.
If I noticed a problem with people messing with my laundry, I’d have to hang out in the laundry room while my clothes are in the machine.
I picked B too, for pretty much the same reason, though I was in a little dorm so there were 4 washers for 150 girls. We did have a fuss get kicked up once, but the problem was that we used a contact paper sheet on the top of the washers to indicate whose laundry was in it when, and the marker got all over someone’s wet clothes when someone dumped them. A new rule was instituted: leave your laundry basket next to the washer OR clothes were placed on an ink-free table nearby. Some people felt like person A did, in that we shouldn’t touch their clothes at all, but they lost the vote at a rate of 5 to 1.
Tenant B without a doubt. Tenant A - chill out dude! The fact that I touched your precious clothes did not do them any harm.
I used to live in an apartment building with one washer and drier on each floor (I now live in one with 4 washers and driers on each of floors 4 and 10 - lucky me! I just happen to live on the 4th floor:D).
Regarding throwing stuff on the floor - In the old place I always liked to start my laundry the moment I was allowed in the morning so usually the washer was empty. However several times I found clothes in the drier that were from the **previous **evening! Under those circumstances I did my first wash (about 1/2 hour) and if the idiot that had left his clothes overnight hadn’t come to get them I dumped them on the floor in the hallway. I needed the space on top of the drier because I usually ran several loads through one after the other and the room was so small that the drier top was the only free space.
And no, I didn’t put the clothes I pitched on the hallway floor back, because I see no reasonable excuse for leaving your clothes overnight in the drier and expecting to retrieve them after you’ve had your beauty sleep.
Right, IMHO you have 15 minutes.
I voted for B because I shouldn’t have to waste my time.
But there are a couple of solutions like:
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As already mentioned, leave your laundry basket/bag so someone doesn’t have to put your laundry on a dirty surface.
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Somebody get a little white board and affix it to the wall. The person who leaves their laundry could write their apartment # so that if someone comes in to see your laundry they can knock on your door. There are only 10 apartments on each floor so it’s not like it’s that far to go. I’d rather do that than to wait around for the machine and getting more and more p.o.'d or touch someone else’s laundry. But I will if I have to.
If no response, then the deal is off and you can remove the laundry and put in your stuff.
Another vote for set your timer and get your clothes out yourself if you don’t want anyone touching them in shared laundry rooms. Other people shouldn’t have to wait for a machine once your clothes are done.
Tenant B, all the way.
And I’m probably the person who left the clothes there. I’m a little flaky like that, and I’d feel bad that I’ve inconvenienced someone. Bad enough that they had to bother moving my clothes. It would be worse if they waited and waited for me to come back!
Fortunately, the building I’m in now has 2 washers and 2 dryers for maybe 20 people, so we almost never run into this problem.
Tenant A, but only if it was really 10 minutes.
Thankfully I’ve not had to deal with this in years (4 washers and 4 dryers for 6 apartments, currently), but my general rule of thumb is that if there’s clothes in a non-running machine, I’ll go do something else for 10 minutes and come back. I might wait in the laundry room for another 5. If you’re still not there, out it comes.
On the flip side, I do set a timer and get my ass down there within minutes of the cycle ending, so I absolutely do get pissed off if someone touches my clothes. Once I actually had some jewel (an adult in an apartment complex, so she didn’t have youthful ignorance as an excuse) remove my damp clothes from a still running dryer so she could use it. I guess she didn’t want to pay for her own cycle. :rolleyes: I went back before the cycle should have finished to find my clothes all wrinkled to hell in a wad on top of the washer. If I had paper I might have written a really nasty note pointing out that theft of a $1 dryer cycle was still theft; what I really wanted to do was get my clothes dry, but I figured if I put them back in she’d just pull them back out again. So I put my clothes in my basket, pulled out all her wet clothes and dumped them back into the empty washer, and turned the dryer back on so it would run down. She could pay for her own damn cycle.
I was thisclose to just dumping her clothes on the incredibly dirty basement floor, but I didn’t.
My rule of thumb is “Do I have space?”. If yes, I don’t care if someone’s left their clothes in overlong, but if no, then I’m moving their clothes. Since Tenant B had other washers to use, I sided with A.
It depends on a lot of factors. I’ve lived in some rough apt. complexes with some rough characters where there really wasn’t a sense of community. Some people take it personal when someone touches or moves there stuff without permission. A lot of people have no rational sense of fairness. A lot of people are just looking for a reason to get insulted so that they can start sh*t. In those situations, I wouldn’t move anybody’s stuff unless I really needed to.
In a place where people are rational and stable and there is a sense of community, I think that it is OK to take out someone’s laundry and place it on a clean surface after a few minutes of waiting.
In a place where there is only a few washers for 100’s of people, I think that it is OK to take them out immediately. I personally wouldn’t leave my clothes while they were washing in that situation due to the chance of someone just taking my clothes out before they were finished.
The problem I have is that Tenant B apparently removed them immediately. I always think it’s okay to be off at least five minutes, so I’d probably give that long, unless I’m in a hurry.
That said, he didn’t do anything wrong. The only reason to care that someone else touched your stuff, if they didn’t do anything bad to it, is some type of magical thinking. Barring living in a place like Markxxx apparently has, I would not put up with it for long.
You should be there when it’s done, and if your not people can move them in a clean way. Dumping on the floor is not acceptable. Be glad you don’t have to be there the whole time the laundry is been done like in a public laundromat.
First, I’m Tenant B. I moved her clothes. I started the poll because I was surprised how adamant she was that what I did was “really rude.” To me it was a little tiny bit rude, and rather normal.
I saw clothes in the washer, so I put them on top of the dryer. The top of the washer is where people spill detergent, and onto the floor would have been actually rude.
40 minutes later, she was leaving the laundry room area as I was entering to put my clothes in the dryer. This makes me suspect that she really just put her clothes in the dryer (at least) 40 minutes after they were done. It’s also possible she was just checking on her clothes or walking by. Anyway, she asks me if I’m the person who moved her clothes. I said that I was.
Her: I was only gone 5 minutes, so please don’t do that
Me: There’s no way I could have known that it was only 5 minutes
Her: Well, next time don’t do that
and then while walking away, turns back and said, while making a yucky-face “next time please don’t touch my underwear.” Probably the second remark was directed at my confused/astonished face. (I must say it was the yucky-face that offended me. Like I have cooties and defiled her by touching her underwear. oh noes!)
Then it gets weird.
So I was all like “WTF?” but I don’t say anything. As her clothes are now in the dryer, I take my load upstairs to use that dryer. There I run into an acquaintance, Tenant C, and ask him his take on the situation. He begins to agree with my argument “how do I know if it was 3 hours or 5 minutes?” when Tenant A comes up the stairs and says “are you talking shit about me behind my back?” [Here it turns out that they know each other (just what I need), and it looks like Tenant A was on the way to Tenant C’s apartment.] I replied that I was asking my friend an etiquette question, not “talking about her”. She says some confused bullshit about how I didn’t want to apologize downstairs and when I say that it’s because I didn’t think it was rude, she says it was really rude. Whatever, they both leave to his apartment.
Later on, as I go back to get my second load out, I meet her in the laundry again. Now, I don’t need an enemy down the hall, so I make a half-assed apology about how I didn’t mean any harm, and how I understood clothes-moving to be the accepted practice in communal laundries. I won’t admit fault because (1) she’s wrong, and (2) she insulted me.
We sort-of make up, which is good, but she said 3 things that exasperate me. First, that she knows various other people in the building (this I’ve seen) and people-moving-clothes is a communal gripe. In other words, her friends are the kind of people who apparently leave their clothes in overtime often enough that they get moved often enough that it’s a gripe! What’s more likely, of course, is that she’s bullshitting me in response to my assertion that moving-clothes is accepted practice.
Second, she says “I’m sure you didn’t want to move my clothes and I wouldn’t want to move your clothes.” But she has clear evidence that I don’t mind moving her clothes, namely, that I moved her clothes. And I tried to explain that I thought it was no big deal, but she can’t see that the weirdness of touching other people’s clothes is not a universally held belief. So when she tried to appeal to this, she reminded me those 2 year olds in those experiments who don’t understand that when the first doll puts the ball in box 3 when the second doll is out of the room, then the second doll won’t know which box the ball is in when he comes back into the room.
Thirdly, she said that people aren’t always clean in our building, so it’s gross that her “fresh clothes” got put on top of the dryer, and not some OCD thing on her part. She didn’t see the irony of this statement.
If the wash cycle has stopped and your down there with your load to wash.
Go ahead take my clothes out no problem. I’m tardy, my fault. I could only be a few minutes late to a day or two how are you to know which it’s going to be.
I did have a neighbor who took my clothes out in the middle of the wash cycle once because for one reason or another it was more important that they wash their clothes first instead of mine, even though they had no idea who’s soaking wet load they were dumping on the dryer. So when I came down in a timely fashion to put my clothes in the dryer to discover my load had been removed mid cylce. I unplugged their load in mid cycle and took my clothes back upstairs.
How do you like them apples ?