At the apartment April and I live in, we share one laundry room with the other 75 units on site so doing our laundry is never an easy task. The laundry room houses six washers and six dryers and without fail, at least one machine in the room is always in use at any time of day on any day of the week. In an effort to make doing laundry a much more enjoyable experience, the management at the apartment set hours of operation for the room but of course, no one adheres to those hours and no one enforces said hours.

It’s not often a surprise to walk all of your laundry down to the room only to find that all of the machines are occupied. Now, there’s nothing one can do about that so it really does no good to get angry over the lack of available machinery. However, it does ruffle some feathers whenever all the machines are seemingly unknowingly occupied. It’s aggravating to find a dryer with clothes in it that are completely cold. I can’t imagine the dryer cools very fast so whomever decided to leave their laundry in there must have left it in there for quite some time.

Furthermore, it is distressing to no end to walk out and find that all the machines are occupied with somewhere in the neighborhood of six-seven minutes remaining on the spin cycle only to have to walk back to the apartment with all the laundry; then to walk back out to the room a half hour later only to find that all of those machines are still occupied with a “spin cycle complete” blinking on them. Who does their laundry this way?

There have been countless times when we’ll go out there and that’s what happens. Once, April stayed in the laundry room when she went back for a third time and decided to just wait for whomever had left their clothes there. Moments later, a lady appears and removes her clothes to move them over to the dryers. I arrive and proceed to help April load the washer but the lady stops us and says that she is still using the machine. What? Really? You just removed your clothing. About two minutes later, her husband shows up and loads the empty machine that had our clothes in it just moments ago. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the lady later ended up being one of the people who leaves her clothes in the dryer for years on end.

Whenever I or April do laundry, we’ll set a timer with an alarm so that we know about when we’ll need to return to the room. It’s just what we feel is common courtesy. While I complain about the senselessness that takes place in that room, we’re actually much more tolerant of the incredible stupidity that occurs there. We’ll walk away; come back later; stand and wait; you name it, we’ve done it. We’ve never once said a word to anyone, which makes having our clothes removed in by someone (likely three minutes after our cycle is completed) so that they can do their own laundry all the more unnerving.

It is unbelievably to me that there are such inconsiderate people in the world let alone that they live just a few doors down from me. No matter. Life goes on. But for now, I will complain to myself.