Xander de Vries
It was 12 a.m., and if my mom had any say in this, I would have been asleep. Instead, I was in the laundry line in the Saybrook College basement. There wasn’t actually a line, it was more of an amoeboid blob of people loitering about, and I had no idea where I was in the queue. Not that it mattered, because it didn’t seem like the blob would ever go anywhere, at least until someone removed their clothes from a washing machine. The washers were all full, several with clothes that had been sitting there for some time, and you could just feel the tension from the loiterers — small sighs, glimpses at the door. This was seriously stupid. Realizing that someone had to be the hero, I walked up to one of the washers and began grabbing indiscriminate handfuls of boxers, undershirts, Speedos. Sure enough, at the first touch of a Speedo, as if the touch had set off a burglar alarm, the guy showed up.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said, rather snidely.
I was pretty sure I was entitled to remove finished laundry, but I couldn’t help thinking that I wouldn’t want a stranger second-handedly touching the more intimate parts of my body. Before I knew it, I was too morally flummoxed to say something snide back, like “Yeah, you will.”
Spend enough time in the Saybrook laundry room, and you start to lose it. The place is an ethical minefield. There is no escape from life’s quandaries, no easy out from life’s moral dilemmas — at least not if you’re unwilling to give up your spot in line. You must face the line-cutter, the clothes-mover, the detergent-stealer. Some think they can evade all B.S. with earbuds, but the fact is, when someone cuts in front of them, those earbuds come out faster than a dryer breaks down after being repaired.
And the oven’s preheated. It’s hard not to spatchcock someone for the littlest of faux pas when, for the last half-hour, one’s been staring at dirty underwear, crusted socks, stained bras, dust balls as sturdy as NYC rats, an ice maker that wheezes and rattles mightily yet fails to do the one goddamn thing it’s supposed to do, a “WET FLOOR” sign standing atop a completely dry, even dusty, floor. Propaganda instructing you to “Stop Using Tide Pods: They’re Microplastics,” to “Wash Cold: It’s Great Practice For When You Have To Pay Your Own Electricity Bill” and to “Call Yale’s Mental Health Hotline At Once.” (Anyone who spends time down here would have to.) Machines in which the only operational hardware is the card reader, folks learn the hard way. A dry erase board that, thanks to vandalism, says “THANK YOU FOR YOUR RATIO .” A pile of clothes that has sat undisturbed for so long it has begun to develop the distinct white fuzz and firm rind of Camembert.
So it’s no wonder that in the laundry room, when goaded by fluorescent lighting and nettled by the suffocatingly fresh odor of Dawn-Kleen, people become the dirt-scraping, knuckle-dragging beasts they really are at heart. The turn of the screw comes when, in such a condition, they must grapple with the implications of normative models of morality. You’ve finished your laundry and the lint-catcher is full; should you clean it, even though it won’t benefit you? If you know the hack for free laundry, should you deprive CSCPayMobile of $1.50? Should you eat a Tide Pod? And so on.
It turns out that everyone has a different opinion on these questions. Adam, a friend in Saybrook, adheres to the utopian belief that nobody should steal another’s clothes, and then there’s Maria, who makes off with entire recycling bins and also a pair of sheets that she had been “missing for more than a year.” (Those sheets couldn’t have been hers. Someone else would have already taken them.) Freddy claims that he’s always on time to pick up his laundry, so nobody should ever have to touch his clothes. Chris believes that there should be a law requiring the offender to forfeit possession of clothes left unattended for longer than five minutes. What’s remarkable is that each believes with unfaltering certainty that they are correct.
But there’s one thing all my friends can agree on, and it’s Maria’s response to whether the Saybrook laundry room is an enjoyable place: “Hell, no!” Maria has seen a roach scamper across the floor. Chris has seen a used condom on the floor, probably picked over by the roach. One time Maria dropped her underwear behind the condom cabinet and couldn’t quite reach them. She was so worried about toppling the cabinet — and having to explain to the next laundry room user why she was double-fisting handfuls of condoms — that she actually paid a long-armed friend to retrieve the underwear.
It’s not as bad as it used to be, though. Back in the day, there were coin-operated machines, asbestos ceilings and, worst of all, one “Poopetrator.” Legend has it that in broad daylight, the Poopetrator would swagger into the Saybrook laundry room, pull down his pants (I can only imagine it was a he), and actually soil the clothes of his enemies. “Apparently someone, like,” Maria leans in to whisper the atrocity, “shat in the dryer.”
Be apprised that the Saybrook laundry room’s only ventilation is hot air from the dryers.
Although the Poopetrator has graduated and is likely now at large on Wall Street, the laundry room hasn’t improved much. Its last renovation was in the ’70s — a decade which, with its popcorn ceilings, linoleum floors and astro-arcade carpets, was undoubtedly the nadir of interior design. Judging by the machines’ functionality, they also haven’t been checked in on since then. Laban, a facilities employee, thinks Saybrook should do some demolition and rebuild from the ground up. But if Yale’s approach to repairing broken machines is any indication, I’m not so sure that is a good idea. They would either forget to build a new laundry room, or, in characteristic fashion, simply deny that it was torn down at all.
There comes a point when repeated payments of $1.50 to the same broken machine start to add up, so one day, after paying a machine twice without it showing the faintest sign of a pulse, I decided to file a report. But how? Yale’s facilities department seemed a reasonable place to start. I called them and was instructed to hold, listened to some rather pleasant yet low-fidelity neo-soul and was directed to their supervisor. I called the supervisor and was immediately told to “hold on a minute.” I listened for several minutes to a piano waltz that at first sounded like Chopin, but by the fifth repeat seemed rather more like the tediously predictable Johann Strauss II and was redirected to CSCPayMobile’s customer service department. CSCPayMobile is Yale’s laundry concessionaire — in other words, the people who had robbed me. This seemed promising, if I could survive the hold.
I barely did. After hearing a jolly robotic voice tell me, “Your call is important to us!” and dialing no less than five extensions, each of which had a less cheery robot than the last, I endured 15 minutes of a 30-second loop of gain-clipped dodecaphonic elevator jazz, punctuated at times by a deep-voiced utterance of “CSCPayMobile,” which sounded like a hideously out-of-place producer tag, followed by the number of callers in front of me — a number that hardly ever changed. Finally, I demanded from the harried agent who picked up — the unfortunate lightning rod for all anti-CSC-sentiment — that I receive $8 in refunds. ($3 for the machine and $5 for my wasted time on that call.) The check will be mailed to my address — which the agent asked for only once, and made not a single typing or scribbling noise while I recited it — at some indefinite time.
CSCPayMobile’s full name is Coinmech Service Corporation Service Works (PayMobile). If only all corporations were “service corporations,” doing good deeds out of the largesse of their corporate hearts! For all CSCPayMobile’s repeated and grammatically redundant emphasis on “service,” the sort of service it provides falls somewhere between a disservice and a U.S.-involved foreign military conflict. It is perhaps significant that this laundry company omits the word “laundry” from its name yet decides to include “pay.” If there’s anything that CSCPayMobile is laundering, it’s our cash.
While in the Saybrook office on some small business matters (it’s one of life’s little ironies that the smallest matters take the longest for the bureaucracy to even begin to give a damn about, and thus, with all the nudging, bumping, circling back, etc., take up the most time in one’s schedule), I mentioned that several dryers were not working. The administrator’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“I didn’t know anything about this,” she said.
Then something unprecedented happened. One after another, every other person in the office — each a Saybrook laundry room user, each accustomed to jockeying with their peers in that most Darwinian of environments — said the same thing: “I can confirm.” Sensing the pack closing in, the administrator hurried off, ostensibly to put in a call. She’s probably still on hold.