Today I really needed to do laundry. Our apartment building has washers and dryers but they use special tokens, so you have to go to another building to buy these tokens to use the machines. It costs 3 and 2 euros for the washer and dryer respectively, so every load of laundry costs 5 euros. Whoa! I complained about UGA being expensive!
Let me preface this story by saying that I like to pride myself as someone who possesses a reasonable amount of common sense and an ability to problem-solve.
So Ashlee and I went to this other apartment building today to purchase our coins. The lady in the office buzzed us in the door via an intercom, but when we got inside the building we couldn’t for the life of us figure out where this office was. We looked in every door on the first floor, second floor, and basement, thinking that it couldn’t be anywhere else, but no luck. We went back outside, re-buzzed the office, and Ashlee asked for directions, but a car drove by as she answered so we didn’t hear it. Back to square one. We finally got in the elevator in hopes that there would be a sign or something, and sure enough there was – the office is on the FOURTH floor of this building.
Upon return to our building, we went to the basement to find these washing machines. We walked into the room and saw a ping-pong table, lots of bikes, and two locked metal doors (with no signs) that look like utility closets. Definitely no washing machines. After finding a friend and asking him exactly where they were, it turns out that the laundry room is behind one of the locked doors, and we must use our room keys to open the door. Oh, right, because I usually attempt to unlock random doors with my room key!
I finally got in the room, figured out how to use this strange washing machine, put it on the setting I want, put my clothes in, I’m good to go. I remembered clearly that the UGA washing machines take 37 minutes, so in about 34 I headed back downstairs to wait on my clothes. They were still happily spinning away on the “main wash” cycle, so I returned upstairs. About 20 minutes later I checked on them again – still on “main wash.” At this point it’s been an hour, my clothes are still sudsy, and they still have to rinse and spin! I sat and stared at the washer dumbfoundedly, pushed some buttons to see what they would do (nothing), and watched the washing machine next to mine cycle through wash-rinse-spin-end, wondering what I was doing wrong. I turned the dials to the same setting as that other washer – no luck. Luckily the owner of those clothes came into the room as I was guessing the washing machine was broken and I was going to have to rinse everything in my kitchen sink.
As it turns out, the washing machine was not broken. If left to their own devices they take approximately 2 hours to go through the whole wash cycle, unless you manually turn the dial to “rinse” – which I had in fact done, except I didn’t reset the dial before I adjusted the settings.
I doubt my clothes will ever again be so clean.
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2 comments:
Her laundry she finally cleaned
In a locked away washing machine.
It went and it went,
Three euros she spent,
Now she has squeaky clean jeans!
haha! Our laundry has a similarly complicated system! only it's not as expensive and only takes an hour and a half :-p But yeah, my roommates and I have had some interesting times trying to figure out the laundry machines :-p
oh and we don't have dryers - just a lot of clothes lines! haha
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