Laundry Day

This is what doing laundry looks like for me:

I’ve been putting it off for not just days but weeks, wearing the same two pairs of jeans more times than would be socially acceptable (if people knew) and wearing my Nike shorts whenever possible in order to stretch my underwear supply as far as I could. Even then, I’m actually amazed that I have enough clothes to go this long without washing any. I’m just really gross, I think.

Anyway, the dirty laundry was overflowing out of the basket and covering the floor of my closet, blanketing my shoes so thoroughly that I’ve worn the same pair of sandals every day in order to avoid digging under the clothes. (This is also how I’ve avoided the problem in general. Whenever I take off a dirty t-shirt, I just toss it into the closet real quick and slam the door without looking in. What you can’t see can’t hurt you, right?)

But today I spontaneously found enough motivation to tackle it. (Running out of clean underwear might have been a contributing factor.) I laboriously pulled it all out into the middle of my room and sorted darks from lights, then took the two trips necessary to carry it all down to the laundry room. After loading one washing machine, pouring the necessary detergent in and paying the egregious $1.50 for its use, the card reader politely informed me that the machine was out of order. AFTER I paid?! Fantastic. So I moved those clothes to the next machine and the other load into a different one, paying nearly five dollars to wash two loads of laundry.

Half an hour later, it was time to shift them to the dryers. Fortunately those are big enough to fit my gargantuan two loads combined, so I loaded it all into one machine. Swiped my card, paying another egregious $1.50, only to find that machine was OUT OF ORDER TOO. How many times can this happen to one person? It seemed to make the most sense to lift all my wet clothes into the dryer above the one I had chosen, so I got my day’s workout hoisting armfulls of several weeks of wet clothing. Then I glanced down at the label and realized I had entirely misread it and had just succeeded in loading my clothes into the out-of-order dryer I had just unwittingly paid for, while the dryer my clothes were just in was a dryer that worked. COOL. So I moved them all back down to the first dryer, paid for that one, and stumbled out of the laundry room tired, damp, and utterly defeated.

I conclude that it would have been easier and cheaper to mail it all home and pay my little sister to do it for me.

Comments

  1. Susan - May 15, 2013 @ 10:30 pm

    As far as I can tell, this is the last post from Duke this semester. No summary of life as a DOOKIE except for tenting and dirty laundry?? Alas, poor Caroline. We have been left to wonder what it's like. OH YES! There was the part about the in dorm social scene, parking and the non-sorority-sorority life. How about a non-biased comparison of the 2 schools. How were the classes/students/professors alike and different? What about learning for the sake of learning? Which one felt like home? Which one offered the most adventure? Having experienced both schools, how are the lives of the students different and how are they the same??? Inquiring minds want to know!

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