IMHO the whole benefit of living in a place where you have a laundry room instead of your own washer is that you can do all your laundry at once. I lived in several places like this over the years, and always waited until I had several loads to do. (I usually swapped laundry chores for dish chores with my roomates.) That’s simple logic and using one’s time wisely. why on earth would I levae a machine open just so that I had to return on another day?
At one place I regularly did a mass 8 loads at once, rolling them to and from the LR in a wheeled plastic “trash” bin I bought for the purpose.
First come first served though, if there’s nothing in the machine, and no one is standing over it with the lid open, it’s free territory.
What I always hated were the people who would leave their things in the dryer for 30 minutes after it had stopped. I always gave them 20, then put it on top. They hated it, as did I when it happened to me, but I accepted it as my penance for being tardy.
This. I don’t think it’s rude to use all the machines if you don’t know someone else needs one. You’re not required to just leave one empty on the off-chance someone might wander in with a load. You’re not “hogging” if no one else wants one anyway.
BUT if other people are waiting to also use the facilities, then I think it’s rude to hog all the machines.
Obviously, the answer there is to just fire up all the machines first (as other posters have said), so that they’re all “in use” and then if some one comes in, sorry! All taken! But it’s ridiculous IMO to think you can “call” all the machines when you’re not currently using them all, in the face of someone who obviously needs to use one.
So I don’t think you owe the woman an apology at all. If you’d understood her, you would either have said “Oh. Okay,” and then engaged in some righteous stewing about what a hog she was, or you would have said, “Well, I’m just going to load up one, which will leave you with three, which is fair,” in which case she would have thought you were rude anyway.
Probably best that you misunderstood her and can honestly claim that, if in future you decide you want to be friendly with her.
That’s how I do it too. People in my building (3 washers and 3 dryers in the laundry room) are generally pretty good about sharing, and I can normally get in without any problems by going down as soon as I get home from work, after the daytime people are done but before the evening rush. The only time I’ve truly gotten irritated by someone was one night when one woman had all three dryers, there were people waiting to dry their laundry, and she added extra time to all the dryers! In that situation, I would have either consolidated anything that was still damp into one load, freeing up the other two dryers, or just taken everything back to my apartment and hung the damp clothes to finish drying.
You are entitled to use as many washers or dryers as are not being used by anyone else. If there are multiple machines open and you do not have your laundry and/or detergent loaded into all of them before someone else walks in, tough shit.
I’ll admit to having been guilty of using multiple machines in the past, but only when I got up extremely early on a Saturday morning–5 o’clock, say–to get access to them. A few times people came in as I was loading the first of four machines and took one that I might have wanted; I never protested because, though I am an asshole, I’m not THAT kind of asshole.
The machines are hers only if she’s begun loading them.
It’s not necessarily poor planning. I’d do that during my first stint in corporate sales. I’d be out of town for a week, come back on a Saturday exhausted, and rest for a wekekend rathar than work. Repeat the next week and the third. On the fourth week I’m out of dress shirts.
But, as written in my previous post, I’d get up early on a Saturday or Sunday morning to do it.