Yesterday I found out that I got into the Take 5 Program. Two more semesters of running out of declining a full month before the end of the semester; two more semesters of waiting a half an hour outside the back door of Hillside after midnight waiting to be let in; two more semesters of not being able to play basketball on any of the school’s four basketball courts because all of the courts had been reserved for badminton; but most of all, two more semesters of school laundry.
My experiences doing laundry in the different University housing establishments over the past four years are undoubtedly some of the least memorable events of my college experience. Take, for example, the night during freshman orientation when my RA led me and my hallmates on a tour around Gilbert.
When we got to the laundry room, he explicitly stated: “There is no sex in the laundry room.” Perhaps it was meant to be a witty reference to Chris Rock’s “No sex in the champagne room,” or perhaps it was meant to be nothing more than a generic icebreaker that all RAs are encouraged to say. Nevertheless, for a college freshman, sex in the laundry room sounded quite appealing.
Consequently, I began setting my alarm every day for 3 a.m. waking myself up, and sneaking down into the laundry room hoping to catch a couple in the act. This continued for about two weeks until I realized that there was plenty of porn on the internet of two people having sex on a dryer.
The second time I ever did my laundry in college, I made the questionable decision of leaving my clothes unsupervised in the washing machine and coming back an hour later to transfer the clothes into the dryer. This decision backfired, however, as upon opening the washing machine, I found that my clothes had been peed on. I remember saying something along the lines of “things couldn’t get any worse.”
The following week when I did another load of laundry, I again left the laundry on its own, reasoning that it would probably not be peed on two weeks in a row. Indeed, I was right. When I returned to remove my clothes from the washing machine, they were completely gone. It was then that I first learned the invaluable lesson that there were certain things that were worse than getting your clothes peed upon.
As a sophomore, I fell in love with a girl who I met in the laundry room. Our meeting was almost fated – she confronted me as I was taking her dry clothes out of the dryer and folding them atop the drier. “What the hell are you doing with my bras and underwear?” she vehemently exclaimed. “Treating them as delicately and passionately as you yourself deserve to be treated,” I answered coolly.
Though she refused to give me her name, screen name or telephone number, I was able to find all three on her Facebook profile, in addition to her building of residence and room number. Armed with this newfound information I “spontaneously” bumped into her again a week later in the laundry room. When she entered the room, I was once again folding her clothes. Approaching me in a manner analogous to our previous encounter, I quickly turned around to face her and offered her a bouquet of paper flowers that I had made out of scented fabric softeners. With this grand romantic gesture, so began our inextricable romance. The romance, however, would eventually come to an end after I found out that my laundry companion had betrayed my trust. A friend of mine had seen her doing laundry with another guy, and, apparently, she had taken my clothes out of the dryer while they were still damp and then filled the vacant dryer with the other guy’s clothes.
Two weeks ago, I found myself completely out of socks and underwear. Accordingly, I was forced to make a late night/early morning laundry room run. When I got to the laundry room, I saw a sight which shocked me to my very core: my freshman RA was having sex with the laundry girl who I fell in love with as a sophomore on top of a washing machine. I quickly turned to my freshman RA and asked “didn’t you graduate like three years ago?” “Indeed I did,” retorted my former RA, “but laundry room sex was worth coming back for.”
Schwartz is a member of the class of 2007.
