laundromats.

This post is about laundromats. If you're one of those people with the sweet, sweet luxury of having a washer and dryer in your home then this should be enlightening for you.

I am grateful that laundromats exist; without them I'd be a pretty disgusting person. But the only good thing about them is that they have washing machines and dryers inside them. Other than that they are pretty hellish places, in my experience.

Let's start with the obvious reason why laundromats suck: its fucking hot in there. They're long hallways full of heat machines. Even in the winter its an uncomfortably warm environment. In the summer being in the laundromat is tantamount to setting yourself on fire. You sweat so much that you kind of don't want to touch your clean clothes because you yourself feel so filthy and unclean, not to mention the fact that the clothes you're currently wearing are probably dirty too. Its literally impossible to wash all of your dirty clothes at once because you're in public and public nudity is not permitted in our society. You end up wearing some shitty outfit you probably wouldn't wear normally, adding slightly to your already pretty significant physical discomfort.

As I mentioned above, its literally impossible to wash all of your dirty clothes at once, but I'll be damned if there aren't people who try. These are the worst kind of people. When you walk into a laundromat with the intention of dominating the entire facility for your own personal use, you're an asshole. Sure, there are other laundromats around, probably only a few blocks away, but I lugged my twenty pound bag of shit here, and now I have to get back in my car and go somewhere else? Fuck you. This happened to me recently and after opening every washing machine to find that they were all full of wet clothes, and then noticing every dryer tumbling, I turned to the guy and said, "Really?" His only response was to smile and shrug coyly as if that would make up for the shitty thing he was currently doing.

These next two things I'll complain about briefly because they're only mildly irritating. First of all, the quarter machine. Maybe its just my imagination because I'm already annoyed to be there, but in a laundromat those electric dollar eating slots are even more temperamental than all the other electric dollar eating slots I typically encounter. Why can't this technology be improved upon? No one walks around with perfectly crisp dollar bills. They're ALWAYS folded. That's usually a result of storing them inside a thing called a BILL FOLD. Also those rolling baskets that you need to transfer your wet clothes over to the dryer ABSOLUTELY ALWAYS have wheels that don't roll. Maybe one or two do but that makes it worse because those wheels cause the thing to veer off in directions you don't want it to. Its literally like those things are resisting you. If they could talk they'd be screaming, "NO! NOT THE DRYER! ANYTHING BUT THE DRYER!"

The final sucky thing about having to do your laundry in public is just that: you have to do your laundry in public. There's simply no one out there who wouldn't prefer to wash their dirty underwear in private. Doing laundry is kind of an intimate thing. I don't want strangers to see my underwear. Maybe that's prudish but I just find it creepy. I'm always embarrassed to see my delicates tumbling away in the clear-doored dryer for all to see (including the boozed up hobo who I believe pissed his pants beside me). Also, not knowing what was in the washing machine before I use it has always been a little disconcerting to me. What if some dude shit himself and used this machine just moments before I did? Its a scary thought, but one I'll have to put out of my mind because my laundromatting days are far from over.