You know you’re bad at laundry if…
Recently I experienced the worst laundry day. The process shook my identity and left me feeling: “Wow, if I’m this bad at punching buttons, what does that say about my ability to function as an adult.” Laundry is such an easy task; we literally outsourced the job to robots, but I failed even with the simple steps. Theoretically, the process should be a simple delegation along the lines of: Robot do this and I’ll exchange you quarters.
The disastrous night was well encapsulated by my pre-laundry, post-work snack. I grabbed a banana, peeled it, tried to take a bite… but the banana broke in half and dropped to the floor. Normally, I’m a big advocate of the 5-second rule, but the dismaying banana rolled across the floor, picking up grime and grossness. Basically, Life walked over, smacked me across the face, and said, “Your move.”
You know you’re bad at laundry if after spending $14 and waiting three hours, you walk away with negative one loads of clean laundry. A sad, embarrassing negative one loads.
You know you’re bad at laundry if you accidentally spoiled someone else’s load in the process of “cleaning” your own clothes. In another life, it’d be the equivalent of me trying to farm for the first time, not knowing the difference between a weed and an edible crop, then killing the entire village harvest.
You know you’re bad at laundry if you mistakenly hang your wet towels above the forgotten laundry basket of another apartment tenet. When you realize your mistake, it’s too late… They’ll probably need to re-wash/re-dry their clothes. You hastily grab the wet evidence and scram; the towels are still drying (unsuccessfully) in your apartment bathroom.
You know you’re bad at laundry if you stuff the washer with more t-shirts, towels, and blankets than manabale, which it later spits out prematurely. In the same way that extreme pressure can produce diamonds from coal, excessive amounts of laundry can metamorphose into a giant ball of fabric, which can surprisingly break open the locked door of a washer. The escape effort leaves you with a soaking (strong emphasis on soaking) pile of inmates.
You know you’re bad at laundry if it’s been an entire month since your last laundry day. (And maybe you rounded down from two months to one month to keep some respectability...)
You know you’re bad at laundry if you’ve used the laundry room so many times in a single day, that you accidently broke the electric lock on the laundry room door during your final pick-up. From what you could tell, the lock ran out of batteries; yeah, that’s your on the record hypothesis.
In addition to the one load of laundry I ruined with my wet towels, I inadvertently savaged another innocent bystander load of laundry. Because my overly bulky loads of laundry (which took up all the available dryers) weren’t drying quickly, I had to run them multiple times. This prevented others from drying their wet (transitioned into wrinkled) clothes.
At the end of the night, feeling ashamed of my bad laundry habits, I looked in the mirror and told myself I needed to change. It crosses the line when innocent loads are spoiled in the crossfires of my deplorable laundry habits. From here on out, I vow to do a single load of laundry once a week. It’s never too late to change.
