I lived in Harnwell last year, on the 12th floor right next to the laundry room. My roommate and I had a sizable double with brand new carpets that our entire un-renovated floor was jealous of.

For more than a semester it remained a mystery why my roommate and I were fortunate enough to receive such a gift from the housing gods. But slowly the truth came out and we were less than pleased. Over the summer, prior to our arrival on campus, the floor’s laundry room literally exploded. Pipes burst and drowned the machines, and the water flowed right into our adjacent room. New carpeting and furniture were installed immediately and our R.A. was told to keep it hush hush. Our laundry room had received minimal repairs and for the remainder of the year we were scared that an eruption would occur again.

Every student living on campus is well aware of the horrors of their dormitory’s laundry room. The antiquated washers and dryers are money guzzling machines that steal your quarters and give you marginally clean and half-dry clothing. The Penn Cash swipe system remained out of commission the entire year, so every time I did laundry, an entire $10 roll of quarters would be used to do my loads.

Feeling ripped-off and angry, I decided to take matters into my own hands and follow the advice of my mischievous friends at Penn State, who to this day claim to have never spent a cent on dormitory laundry. Their method of cost cutting: Latex gloves.

They advised me to put five quarters into each of the fingers of the gloves and then insert the gloved quarters into the machine’s slots, allowing one to save their quarters before the machine swallows them. For my PSU buddies their method was flawless. I, on the other hand, was left with dirty clothes and a jammed quarter collector.

Thankfully, the Undergraduate Assembly has decided to take action against on campus laundry woes by initiating The Laundry Facilities Plan of Action, which will utilize a complaint system in hopes of improving the condition of laundry rooms. Two laundry rooms in Ware College House have been chosen to trial run the complaint system, if all goes well, the system may be implemented in all dorms across campus.

Hopefully the university is recognizing the need for more efficient washers and dryers so that students like me do not have to resort to fishy cost cutting methods that utilize items that should be reserved solely for hospitals and biology labs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.