laundromats.
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The new apartment doesn’t have a washer or
dryer, so it’s back to the old laundromat routine. When I lived
in Belmont, I actually kind of looked forward to laundry day. I’d
go once every two weeks, getting up early on the weekend or going on a
weeknight to avoid the crowd, and I’d get the whole bit done in a
single two-hour stint. I had it down to a system, and it was good
to get it out of the way all at once. Besides, it was a decent
enough laundromat, usually clean, with modern machines, and a
Starbuck’s right next door. I'd get some coffee, do a little
reading, and then fold some clothes. In fact, for the first couple of months after I moved to
the far side of Cambridge, I kept taking my laundry all the way back to
Belmont even though I had a washer/dryer unit in my condo.
Not so in Norwood. We’ve checked out the three laundromats near us, and they’re all about the same – dingy, trashy, and really, really depressing. The one we’ve settled on is only better than the others in that it’s closer to our apartment and has convenient parking. Like so much of New England, the place looks like it hasn’t been renovated since the sixties. The washers are inconsistent – some of them screw up at random and take about twice as long as normal to finish the cycle. The dryers are also a crap shoot; some have good heat, but invariably some don’t, and which one is going to screw up on a given day is anyone’s guess. A far cry from my wife’s favorite laundromat in Gainesville, which had pool tables and a bar. But the thing that irks me the most about the place (and come to think about it, most laundromats I’ve ever been in, even the good one back in Belmont) is that they have more washers than dryers. To make matters worse, this place also has some of those jumbo industrial washers that do three loads at once. You might think that the owners of the laundromat would balance the number of washers and dryers, but no. They lure you in with a surplus of washers, and then you’re stuck. You’ve got a bunch of wet clothes, so what are you going to do, pack them up and go somewhere else? No, you’re going to suck it up and fight it out with the other patrons and wait until a dryer is available. And what is it with people who abandon clothes in dryers for hours on end? I usually don’t have the nerve to dump them, but given that there’s a shortage of dryers already, there ought to be a rule that any dryer left for more than ten minutes is fair game. Not that I want to explain to the six-and-a-half foot mongoloid why I’m moving his Kiss t-shirts to a basket when he comes storming back in, but you know…it’s the principle of the thing. Our main place was too crowded on a recent laundry excursion, so we moved on to the next-closest one. As it turns out, a half mile can make the difference between the merely mediocre and the truly wretched. It started out okay - the place was almost completely empty when we arrived, and we didn't have any trouble getting machines. It even cost a quarter less per load than at the other place, which had me wondering why the place was empty. Well, whatever...we started our machines and went to the Dunkin' Donuts next door to get some breakfast. When we returned ten minutes later, all hell had broken loose...one of our machines was leaking soapy water all over the floor, and the nice lady I had held the door open for when we left was in the process of pulling my wife's clothes out of a washer before it was even half done. I was astounded...it's one thing to pull clothes out of a dryer that has long-since finished turning, but this lady was pulling clothes out of a machine that hadn't even reached the spin cycle yet. I guess she thought she'd just leave our wet clothes in a basket while she commandeered our machine and that we'd be gone long enough that we would just assume they had been through the entire cycle when we returned. She feigned ignorance while my wife explained that no, the machine was not done yet in the best "polite but firm without being angry" voice anyone could hope to muster given that we had just busted this bitch in what can only be described as a blatant act of theft. As if that weren't enough, two of our machines (including the $4.00 industrial washer we were using for our sheets) quit before reaching the spin cycle, leaving our clothes soaking in pools of dirty water. About the same time, the place was suddenly crawling with people, so we figured it would be better to just re-wash them than to try to run them in the dryer for an extra long time. We splashed our way through the standing water to transfer our other stuff from the washers to the dryers. Then we went through the usual routine of lost quarters in broken dryers and human vultures waiting to dump our clothes the instant the buzzer went off. Needless to say, we're not going back. To think that I’m thirty-six, gainfully employed, and still doing laundry in a laundromat. Where did I go wrong? |