I’m not going to sit down there in our building’s laundry room watching my clothes wash when it’s so much more convenient to just go back up to my apartment and set a timer. That’s what I always do. But I guess you knew that.
What were you thinking? That I wouldn’t notice when I came back down and moved my clothes from the washer to the dryer that three pairs of panties are missing? Fuck that. They’re gone.
And now what the hell do I do? I guess there’s no way to know who you are, but I know you’re here somewhere. It’s not a very big building. Aside from the expense of having to replace them [not cheap!] I now have to think about the fact that you’re out there somewhere and you’ve got MY underwear. Lord only knows what you’re doing with it.
Are you sure the machine didn’t eat them? Or that they didn’t somehow fall outside the gaping maw of the washer when you were stuffing in the clothes, and are even now lying hidden in some dark recess, waiting to be rescued?
As much as I sympathize, and I hate a thief, the thing is that if you don’t stay with your clothes, you’re accepting the risk that they will get stolen. Sometimes it’s worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not. Lesson learned, right?
This is not an uncommon complaint here on the dope, and on many other messageboards. I fail to understand why people will go to a communal laundry room, put their washing on and then leave the laundry and then seem surprised when their clothes get moved/stolen/left in wet piles on the floor.
I get that not everyone has the luxury of their own washing facilities, especially in college situations or large apt buildings. But seriously - other people are jerks, why the hell would you leave your stuff unattended where there’s a chance that any fruitcake could mess with it? Take a book, a gameboy, an iPod - and watch your own belongings, or sack up and deal with it when they get stolen/trashed.
My laundry situation sounds very similar to the OP’s, and I too have no desire to sit down there watching clothes wash or dry - so I never do. I am accepting the risk that something may be stolen (to date, nothing has been) - but I’d still be pissed off if it happened. Justifiably so, I maintain.
I’d probably “sack up and deal with it” by starting a Pit thread…
I never sit with my clothes either. Can we talk about washing machine squatting for a moment? I know for a fact that the machines in my complex take 26 minutes from start to finish. But I routinely encounter fuckwads who commandeer all three machines at once and just leave the clothes sitting there for two hours or more. If I did this personally, I’d expect my clothes to be fucked with.
I feel your pain, emhend. Like brad_d, my situation is eerily similar. I live in a very small apartment complex and there are some weirdos living here. I try to do my laundry late at night when theres fewer people about, but every time I walk away I wonder if my stuff will still be there when I come back.
It’s too bad we live in a world where panties get stolen and some responses are along the lines of, “that’s life, suck it up and bring a book”. If i wanted to be absolutely sure my stuff wasn’t fucked with, sure, I’d stay in a windowless room with no chairs, hot dryers running, kids screaming and banging the door, and said weirdos eyeing me and my clothes. But why should I have to?
Whatever. There’s no spirit behind my rant cause there’s nothing I can do about it.
But I feel you.
I once had an entire load of sheets and towels stolen from the dryer, and I was not late in returning to the laundry room. This was when I was very young and very broke. I ended up drying off with a hand towel until I could afford a new bath towel.
I apologize for the inconvenience to the OP, but it’s just so hard to find women who will agree to give you their used underwear, and they get so pissed off when you try to take them while they’re still wearing them. I mean, what’s a guy supposed to do?
I have to confess here: Many years ago, when I was in college and had no clean underwear and, since it was the end of the semester and I was flat broke, no money to do laundry with, I went down to the laundry room and fished a couple pairs of someone else’s clean panties out of the dryer. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a weirdo; it could just be a slovenly bum like I was in those days.
But having been the doer of that nasty deed, I have never since left laundry unattended in a shared laundry room.
Where I am now, our “laundry room” is essentially a closet. Just big enough for one washer, one dryer, a big-ass water heater and some shelving. I guess I could sit out in the hall while my laundry gets done. It still wouldn’t change the fact that pitting a thief is utterly acceptable.
Even in other places I’ve been where I guess I coulda’ sat there for an hour and a half while one load of laundry got done (like in Texas where the laundry room was essentially a storage shed with electricity and water and no chairs or folding table, or Chicago, where I was in a secure building no chairs and a very skinny folding table) it still wouldn’t change the fact that not all bastards are thieves, but all thieves are bastards.
In every apartment I lived in with shared laundry facilities, the washers and dryers were in extremely creepy basements. You know, the kind with no windows, cement floors, exposed beam ceilings, and one bare lightbulb to illuminate all the various scuttling wildlife such basements invariably host. No fucking way was I ever willing to hang out down there while my laundry processed.
There were occasional problems, but nothing that made me willing to stay with the machines during laundry time. Hell no. I still felt that I had a right to bitch about those issues, though. I’m with you, Emhend.
