The Laudry Experience

I just began my first college clothes washing experience. Allow me to say that the idea crept into my roommate Julia, and my head that it would be best to wash our clothes while everyone else was gone to the football game. I realize that this makes me out to be one who doesn’t support my school, and this would have been the first game of my first year of college, but hey, saying that you missed the first college football game of your college career because you were doing laundry makes just as much conversation as saying you went and such and such team won and lost respectively.
I progressed slowly out into the hallway on one of my now common escapades to the restroom. The hallway was absolutely and completely silent and no one was around. The only other time this is evident, is 7:00 am Saturday mornings. I know this because I had the grand experience of being awake at that hour today as well. Anyway, the point is that everyone on my floor, except Julia and I, had gone to the football. I returned, much relieved, from the restroom and gave Julia the full report. Somehow we both decided that we were going to go wash. Neither one of us really voices it; we just end up doing it. Odd I know.
I arrived at the laundry room first and went to swipe my Coyote Card so I could activate the washer without having to use change. Well, the machine wasn’t on. I trecked back to the room and told Julia that the swipey thing wasn’t working and we were going to have to use coins. Julia was on her return journey as I was heading back to the room, Pluto piggy bank in hand.
I emptied the contents of my little Pluto bank onto the window sill of the laundry room. I was impressed that I managed not to spill them all over the floor and down the now considered antique air conditioner. I found a dollar and began placing and dropping them into the machine. Sadly, I did not have a dollar in quarters. The machine regurgitated the coinage that wasn’t to its liking and I was back into the predicament that I didn’t have what it took to start the damn machine.
Thankfully Julia arrived! I traded her some coinage for quarters and placed them in the machine and for a split second waited for something to happen. It did. Julia asked me why it was I was putting my money into the drier. Yes, I had mistakend the drier for the washing machine.
Well, I gave Julia some paper money for quarters and then took a look at the washing machine. Not all washing machines look like the one you’ve got at home, and this one defiantly didn’t work at all like the one at home. I had to make a decision as to whether I wanted to wash my clothes under the category of: white, colors, or bright colors. I am the type of person who just likes to throw everything in and pray. So far, in my short life of clothes washing, nothing has happened. I always used cold water and there was no water temperature choice, the machine was supposed to think for you. We had a pondering moment or two trying to decide which color cycle correlated to the water temperature. Well that was unnecessary because not only did it say it on the inside of the lid, but once you make your color choice, it pops up on the screen what temperature the water is going to be. Yes, we are brilliant and completely tried to do it the Neanderthalic way.
We figured out what it was we were supposed to do, but then Julia read the instructions and they told us to pour the detergent on the bottom and then put your clothes in. I had already piled all my week’s worth of clothes into the machine, which is very spacious if I do say so myself, and I didn’t want to take any chances with a foreign machine. I took all my clothes out of the washer, threw them on the floor, and then proceeded to follow directions, for once in my life, and poured the detergent in.
When I was gathering my stuff together, I told Julia that she knew I was going to go a write something about the experience. She agreed and then had a moment of enlightenment; she was going to write her Narrative English paper about our first college laundry experience. Things like this need to be noted, because after that first time of errors, it will probably be systematic and natural and I won’t ever be able to tell you, at the end of the year, the days I did laundry.
Julia’s socks and undergarments are pink…ooops.