The New Cold War

I declare anarchy to exist. On this planet there is just one place where this form of government exists and unfortunately many of us experience this often. I am not talking about the ideal anarchy or extreme communism where everybody shares, but I am talking about riots, fires and disorder anarchy. This place is the public laundry room.

Mr dorm building has one laundry room which we share with about two other buildings and each building has around 100 residences. This laundry room has three washing machines and three dryers... oh wait one of the dryers is broken so make that two. Two dryers. I came to this conclusion while doing my laundry the first time and have confirmed it every week after on laundry day. Sunday is the busiest day for laundry and home game Saturdays are the least busiest. I do my laundry on Wednesdays because I like having clean sheets in the middle of the week for some reason, although I will probably switch to Mondays since my afternoon seminar class is over.

Anyway, each machine is on a timer, 38 minutes for washing, an hour for drying, pretty simple. Unfortunately people either Berkeley students have no concept of time or they are forgetful, I will go with the former to be a bigger jerk. I always like to check to see if a machine is open before i decide to drag my clothes two floors down to do laundry, usually there is one free so I grab my stuff and put it in the washer and set the timer on my computer to go off in about 35 minutes. When I put my clothes in the washer I realize there is about 20 minutes left on one of the dryers and about 40 minutes left on the other so I am sure I will be able to grab a dryer when I am done. Half an hour later I see that one dryer is done so I get ready to put my clothes in there, but oh wait, the person with 20 minutes left never came down to get their stuff so now I also have to throw their stuff in their laundry basket as well as put my stuff in the dryer. While I add my clothes to the dryer, the machine I was using to wash gets another load of my laundry and I know there will be a dryer for me to use since no one is using the washing machine but me and the other dryer has about 10 minutes left. I turn the timer on again.

35 minutes later I am ready to put my clothes in the dryer, but wait the machine I was going to use has 50 minutes left on it... apparently the person who was previously using it didn't think their clothes were dry enough so they put it back in for another hour. Now I have to wait at least until my current drying load is done before I can put my soggy wet clothes in a dryer, but I have to take them out of the washer because there is now someone waiting to use the washing machine. And also the clothes I removed from the dryer before I put my clothes in are still on top of the dryer. So I know there is about 20 minutes left on my dryer so I go upstairs and do some more studying and I go back down to collect my dry clothes and replace them with the wet ones from the washing machine incident just 20 minutes prior. Unfortunately there are now two people with wet clothes also waiting for the dryer who had their stuff in the washer with about 10 minutes left when I was removing my second load not too long ago. Now however I feel like an ass because they have also been waiting and I just show up to throw my crap in the dryer I was just using. Now I face a moral dilemma, do I give up the dryer to let the "patiently" waiting neighbors use it, or do I quickly throw my stuff in there and say "too bad, I get it"? I do what any anarchist would do. I take the machine for myself because I know had the situations been reversed they would have pulled the same crap on me.

And where the hell is the owner of these clothes on top of the dryer?