Written by Rachael Hirstein
It’s that time again: laundry day. Students are in and out of the laundry room at all hours of the day loading washers and dryers, but they forget to do one little thing: time their laundry.
With classes, organizations and work, it can be hard to find time to do laundry when students have frantic in-and-out schedules, but when you have to wait for another student to come and get their clothes, doing laundry becomes more of a challenge than a chore.
When the washers take 30 minutes to finish and the dryers take an hour, it can become very difficult to plan periods to do laundry. The washers are small, too, so waiting for a couple to open up to do a large load is horribly frustrating. It is very inconvenient when no one comes back for their clothes and you are forced to either wait for them to come back or just take their clothes out for them.
Nearly every time you do laundry, it’s a game of chance, trying to find an open dryer. They are almost always full, and students don’t come back for their clothes when they are finished because they don’t set a timer for themselves.
This causes problems, like clothes being thrown out of the dryers and onto the floor so that other students can put in their own. People have even stolen clothes because they were left unattended for too long. Some students left clothes in the dryer over winter break, surprising the residents that came back and needed to do laundry.
There are signs all around the Goodwin laundry room that tell students to time their loads. Goodwin has even tried to help students with timing by making a free app for students to keep track of time and availability. Unfortunately, this app has not proven successful.
The app is supposed to show which washers and dryers are open and time your laundry, but none of those features work. The washers and dryers that are said to be open are not, and the timer is never correct. The only way to ensure that students’ laundry is taken out on time so others can use the machines is if the students use their phones’ timers to keep track of their laundry.
The only way to fix this problem is for students to take responsibility for their things and to time their laundry.
