I have lived in many, many apartment buildings over the decades, and have experienced many different kinds of laundry facilities.
Tenant B is correct. Tenant A is being petty, selfish and inconsiderate.
If Tenant A really hates having her clothes touched by other people that much, then she needs to get her ass to the laundry room in time to remove them. The washers and dryers are a limited resource, and she’s hogging them if she’s allowing her laundry to just sit in them, and she’s unreasonable to want other people to just haul laundry up and down flights of steps.
Look, I don’t like people handling my stuff (not just laundry, but ANY of my stuff) either. So I make sure that I don’t give people many excuses to handle my stuff. Tenant A can pretty much completely avoid having people move her laundry by just not leaving her laundry in a washer or dryer that’s completed the cycle. If you had moved her clothes out of a machine that hadn’t finished the cycle, then yeah, that’s rude. But it’s rude to leave laundry in a machine when other people would like to do their frigging laundry and move on with their lives, too.
I knew that I was a grown up when I was excited about getting my own washer and dryer, because that meant that I no longer had to go down to the laundromat or use the setup in the apartment building.
That was pretty obvious, the OP is fairly stacked against Tenant A.
Which is half of 10 minutes.
I’m Tenant A: I’d prefer that folks not mess with my clean damp clothes.
(You shoulda seen some of the folks in my last shared* laundry room…)
However… since I KNOW I am Tenant A, I would go get a book, stay in the room, and pull my laundry out of the machines as soon as I could. result: no drama.
- 30 apartments: 2 washers, 3 dryers. Among the things found there: food, booze, random non-residents, recreational substances, petrochemical residue, and various bodily ejectamenta… to name a few. I’m glad I have my own washer/dryer now
If I have signed up for the laundry room at a certain hour I expect the washer to be empty or I’ll empty it myself. Period.
Shared Laundry… I hate it hate it hate it…
In my first month in university I had all my nderwear stolen… (yes just the underwear) when I left laundry for half an hour in the communal laundry room. It never happend again, laundry time is read a book time.
If someone leaves their clothes in a machine that belongs to the building/univerisity/whathave you, I figure I have as much a right of enjoyment as anyone else and will use the washer or dryer for the purpose intended. To wash, or to dry, not to be a storage hamper for unclaimed laundry.
Because I sit there, I will give someone the benefit of the doubt if I have seen them in and out of the laundry room, I will give them about 10 minutes. Any longer and I am moving it.
Tenant B is clearly in the right - Live in a building with 15 or so apartments, one washer, one drier - won’t hesitate a second from the wash cycle is done until I start yanking out others clothes, unless they are physically in the room. I also expect everybody else to do exactly the same. How on earth is it rude to touch somebody else’s laundry??
I voted with tenant A, for several reasons:
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It’s not your property. What if they accused you of stealing something?
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I usually go with a 15-30 minute grace period.
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Moving somebody else’s laundry only works in college. Adults should know how long the dryer works, and if they don’t, they should sit there with a watch.
I agree with Tenant B, but after your confrontation with Tenant A, I wouldn’t leave my laundry unattended from now on if I were you. No telling how vindictive she is.
First off, let me say that having my own on-premises laudry facilities may well have been the best thing about moving into my 1st house. Also, I’m the crazy kind of guy who brought a book to the laundry and read while it washed/dried, not oly to protect myself (and my clothes) from being messed with, but also so as to avoid inconveniencing anyone else. I thought it was pretty much universal that one of the first things everyone did when using a new laundry facility was figure out the length of the cycles, so as to minimize the risk of this sort of thing…
B all the way. If A is concerned about having her stuff moved onto the drier, it would be very easy for her to either be available when the cycle ended, or to leave her basket there.
But the OP has ZERO chance of convincing A she was wrong. And she should cease commenting about it with anyone else. Instead, it appears this building would benefit from some system, such as the many that have been described above. I like either a bold posting that “Laundry unattended may be removed from the machine once the cycle has finished.” Maybe recommending that people leave their basket for such a possibility. Or perhaps the whiteboard, for posting of apt #s.
If I have booked the laundry room from, say, 3 pm to 7 pm it’s mine during that time. I wouldn’t say anything if the person who laundered before me still uses the dryer, though, as long as I don’t need it myself.
I once lived in a flat where there were three laundry rooms with two washers each and you could use one room for four hours before you could even think of booking one again. When I moved in I was warned about a crazy woman who had her own ideas about booking the machines and I very soon found out that every Saturday she signed herself up for all three rooms simultaneously and then she only showed up if she actually had something to wash.
One day when I came down to check my machine some eedjit had emptied it and filled it with hir own stuff instead so I immediately got that out and put my own back in. Only later did I relise that I had been the victim of the crazy washerwoman, in which case I shouldn’t have put it neatly in a basket. I should have thrown it in a pile on the floor and walked about in muddy shoes instead.
That’s just the problem, though. Some don’t.
Leaving clothes in the washer is not generally a big problem in my building. Leaving them in the dryer often is, though. Those clothes usually get put on the folding table. I’ve seen some clothes sit there for weeks.
I think that sign had better come from the apartment managing company…and even then, A is gonna think that it doesn’t apply to her, or that people who move her laundry are still being rude.
When I lived in a quadplex with one washer and one dryer for the four apartments, I was pretty careful to get my clothes out when the machines were done, even though the laundry room wasn’t really busy most of the time. And since I was a stay-at-home mom when we lived there, I didn’t do laundry on the weekend except for emergencies (I had a toddler at the time), because all the other adults in that quadplex worked, and most of them wanted to do laundry on the weekends.
When I had to do laundry in a laundromat, I took a book and stayed in the building. For one thing, I didn’t want my clothes stolen, but for another thing, I just didn’t want to take forever to do my laundry.
Communal resources will always cause at least a little bit of strife if the community is more than a few people.
Most definitely!
I don’t know what you mean by “stacked.” I tried to make the OP as fair to her position as possible. If you mean that her position is less strong, then I agree.
Except for the difference in time, I presented her arguments as they were presented to me, if not more coherently. As for the 5 minutes vs. 5-10 minutes thing: It’s clear that it wasn’t only 5 minutes, as I didn’t see her (or hear the machine) in the time I took to walk down the hall, move her laundry, and put mine in. So instead of calling her a liar in the OP, I changed “5” to “5-10,” which I though was the more charitable option, actually.
There is no sign up system, and I have never heard of this. It sounds dreadful. I don’t know ahead of time when I’ll want to do laundry.
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They left their property in a public place, and I didn’t steal anything. Their paranoid fantasies are their problem.
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I got shit to do. In this case, it was night time, and I needed to get to bed after doing laundry.
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So you are arguing my case for me? I thought you went with Tenant A?
(Bolding mine) I agree that she should. As for me, I only asked Tenant C the question in general because the first encounter just happened and I thought I had gone crazy. He asked who I was talking about, and I shit you not it was 10 seconds later when Tenant A came upstairs. Rather a surprise, I tell you what.