Yes, I accidentally left my sheets sitting in the dryer. We were watching a movie, and I totally forgot that I had things in there. Totally my fault.
So, I guess I can understand you taking my stuff out of those two dryers; at least you were polite enough to put it in the laundry basket I left down there. I don’t particularly like it–I’m normally very prompt about getting my things out of the washers and the dryers (unlike a LOT of people in this building), and I never, ever mess with other people’s things in the machines, even when they leave them sitting for three, four, five hours. Mine sat there an extra twenty minutes, tops.
What I don’t like is you exacting a little levy, stealing a nearly full one-gallon bottle of detergent from me. That takes you out of the realm of impatient, and makes you into a thief. It is a common practice in the building for residents to leave their laundry baskets and detergent/fabric softener there so we don’t have to lug them up and down the stairs every load. But I guess you decided that my twenty-minute attention lapse came with a price. Was it only $3 or so? Sure. But it was my goddamned stuff, and you’re not entitled to it no matter how long I might leave something in the dryer.
So, I hope you’re proud, being nothing but a common thief. My consolation is that I won’t have to share the building with such criminals anymore. By next week, we will be prepared to make an offer on a house, and I will be rid of sharing my dwelling with impolite jackasses like you. Good fuckin’ riddance.
Hooray for you, Phil! A house! You’re ethically entitled, of course, to go get your $3 back if you find out who the thief is. I wish I could be there to watch your back and cheer!
I personally cannot stand it when I am ready to use the dyer and someone’s stuff is still in there. I can either sit and wait for who the heck knows how long, or, I can remove their stuff and move on with life.
I would have folded your sheets for you though.
No excuse for stealing clothes or detergent or anything else, though. That is just uncalled for.
At any rate, doing laundry in public SUCKS. Congrats on the house! Can I bring over my laundry?
Just so you don’t feel so bad, I’ll relate another laundry-related story on the SDMB… one time in Houston a friend of mine left some laundry unattended in a dryer, and somebody threw a bunch of crawfish in there and started the machine up again. You got off easy.
Grrr…I hate it when people take my stuff out of the dryer. Dammit, my underwear is in there. My wife’s underwear is in there! Why on Earth would I want a complete stranger pawing through our clothes? (Of course, after reading this thread I’m profoundly grateful that at least I’ve never had anything stolen…yeesh. And the crawfish thing is just vandalism, right up there with keying someone’s car 'cause you don’t like the way they parked. What the hell is wrong with people?)
To all my fellow laundry-room users: I will make every effort to move my laundry along in a timely manner. I even use a kitchen timer now, to remind me to go back and get my stuff. In return, please show enough dignity and self-restrait to wait your freakin’ turn!
(Oh, and many congratulations on the house, pldennison. I’m far, far away from house-ownership myself, but I do fondly remember one apartment in Vancouver that actually came with a washer and dryer…damn that was nice.)
I don’t particularly like it when people take my clothes out of the washer or the dryer. I make every effort to ensure that I take my clothes out of the machines on time, but sometimes I’m caught up in doing other things. I will take things out of the washing machine and dryer very rarely… I think I’ve done it four times in the two years I’ve lived in this apartment.
Last week, there was some impatient person who obviously wanted to use the washing machine that only required a loonie and a quarter (as opposed to five quarters) so badly that they took my clothes out of that machine. They then stuck their own clothes in there and left mine on top of the other machine. The other machine was empty, by the way, and they could have used it. Oh well…
However, I’d never take someone’s clothing, detergent, laundry baskets, or anything else. That would just be WRONG. I always take my laundry basket back with me to my apartment to minimize the chances of someone else taking my stuff. Not that I’m paranoid, but I do want to protect my stuff, inasmuch as is possible.
**BlinkingDuck, ** I agree with the first sentence of your post. You were a jackass. It wasn’t going to take all that long for a single load of clothes to get folded, so in that particular case you should have waited, not grabbed someone *else’s * things, and, as you said, threw them on the counter. I can see why she was pissed. I hope she won the war you spoke of.
Indeed–if someone were to grab my clothes out of the dryer before my very eyes, while I was unloading them, I would introduce them to the clean, refreshing taste of fabric softener sheets, posthaste.
Lib and Math Geek, yeah, we’re finally buying a house. If I’m going to pay as much for housing here in the DC market as I am, I’m not paying it to a landlord anymore. We’re already approved for a mortgage through USAA, so all we have to do is make an offer, get it accepted, and do the closing stuff. Woohoo.
Luckily I haven’t had to deal with laundry rooms yet. A friend of mine has, though. She lives in dorms at college, and last semester, she could not leave her clothes running. It wasn’t because she’d forget and people would throw her clothes on the counter. No, it was because if she left (even for 5 minutes!), someone would STEAL her clothes before the cycle was even over! :eek:
I’m serious. Her clothes would be gone. She was reduced to a ratty pair of jeans and two t-shirts, and she couldn’t afford to buy more clothes. Finally, one day, she was washing her shirt and she found her clothes in the dryer. She knew they were hers, so she took them and ran up to her room. Since some of the thief’s clothes were still in the dryer, she had revenge:
She put a tube of red lipstick into the dryer, uncapped, with the rest of the clothes and set the heat on HIGH. She also left an ugly note.
I disagree. It is very rude for someone to hold up someone else when they could very easily remove them and open up the dryer for you. I responded to rudeness with rudeness. When someone tells me flippantly that I have wait , I may disagree and take matters in my own hands.
It didn’t help that said woman was very unpleasant and I didn’t like her at all. I might have been more patient with others to the point of asking them to remove their clothes a second time.
I also disagree that someone has a claim to a washer or dryer that isn’t in operation. If it is not running and the person is not there to remove them then another person has every right to remove your clothes, so long as there are no other open machines.
In the dorm, the dryers were the rate limiting step since there was many washers and only two poor dryers. I took to washing my clothes at one in the morning.
I have to agree to a certain extent with Blinking Duck. The person whose clothes are in the dryer rented the dryer for the duration of a drying cycle. They did not buy the thing. The dryer is not theirs. If their clothes are sitting in a cold dryer, dry, and I have clothes of my own to put in, their clothes are coming out of the dryer and, if practical, being folded and stacked on a sorting table.
You have no reasonable right to privacy in a public laundry room. If you don’t wish your underwear to be handled, bring a book or a crossword puzzle and stick around for the (gasp!) 30-45 minutes it’s going to take for your clothes to be dry.
I simply refuse to wait for someone who, for all I know, could have moved to Cuba since they put the clothes in the machine. I don’t know how long the machine’s been off. I don’t know where the owner of the offending clothes is. I don’t know if they’re ever coming back to reclaim their wardrobe. I’m not sitting and waiting for an hour to see if they return before I touch the sacred dryer.
I would never, however, steal clothes. That would be really stupid, even ignoring the moral problems, as very few people are anywhere near my size.
Stealing from the laundry room is flat-out wrong. I’m all in agreement with that.
What I don’t get here are the people whining about other people touching their stuff when the w/d is done and the responsible party isn’t around. AFAIC, if you leave your laundry in the w/d and it finishes before you come back, anyone else who’s waiting has every right to conscientiously remove your items from said w/d and start their own load. They should not plop your laundry onto the floor or some other similarly dirty surface (placing it in a basket that you’ve left behind would be ideal, but putting it on a laundry folding table or some such would be fine IMO…folding it is way beyond neighborly), but they shouldn’t have to wait for you to come back and handle it yourself either.
The fact is, if you’re not in attendance, the newcomer has no way of knowing how long the w/d has been sitting there idle, how long you’ve been away, when they can expect you to return, etc. They don’t know who you are, or what your laundry habits are. They don’t know if you’ve set a timer to remind you to return and retrieve your laundry. All that they know is that the w/d is being tied up with an inactive load and that the owner isn’t present.
IMO, if you don’t want people touching your laundry, then stay there with it. Read a book. Listen to some music. Count ceiling tiles. Whatever. If you choose not to attend to your own laundry, then it’s entirely within the rights of the people you share the facilities with to move things along.
It never occurred to me to be offended when someone took my clothes out of the washer/dryer in my absence. I also take other people’s clothes out and put them in their basket, or on top of the machine. If the cycle is complete, why does it matter?
I wouldn’t want someone to wait around for me in the basement to empty the machine, or have to keep checking back. And I don’t want to have to keep coming back to the basement.
I remember what it was like having to use laundrymats.
I realize that some people out there are considerate and move stuff out of the washer ASAP.
but
most people don’t.
If you don’t want people touching your underware then be sure to be there BEFORE the washer/dryer shuts down. I realize you are busy doing stuff, but the person waiting on your washer has stuff they need to do too.
Back in the day, if someon’es load was done and no one was down there, I would take it out and pop mine in.
Would I fold it? hell no. Why would I want to fold someone’s nasty ol’ clothes? I hate folding my own as it is.
Because the mere idea of some freak fondling my underwear noids me out, I would take a book and sit there and read. Never had anything stolen that way. amazing.
and in the case of Blinking duck, that lady was rude. She could have EASILY put her stuff in a basket. There is ZERO difference between that and leaving it in the dryer except that leaving it in a dryer while someone needs it is rude.
Granted I would NOT pull out her laundry. Instead she would have gotten the evil baboon eye.
however stealing soap etc is totally uncalled for.
The way I would deal with the soap issue is I would put a measure of soap and place it in a sock. The sock would then be tossed in with the laundry.
Jay Jay, Jadis and madmonk have in right, IMO. Normally, I would never fling someone’s laundry anywhere but would take it out and set it on the counter, which was clean since people used it to fold their clothes. She was an exception.
In my experience, most people don’t care but a minority, probably like 20%) just hate other people touching their clothes. They would usually stay in the room and wait for their laundry to be done.
But I can’t think of any good defense for someone that feels that others should wait for them to fold clothes as they remove them one at a time from the dryer. Just plain rude.
