Laundry Room Scribblings (Unfiltered)
I added my own!
When I took the campus tour, I should have asked to see the laundry rooms.
During my freshman year anything (except for final exam week) was better than laundry day. My building had no laundry room, so I had to walk to one of two distant neighboring dorms to use their facilities. Where I went to school, this usually meant a walk through the arctic tundra snow, and then a decision had to be made… stay and wait for the wash, or walk at least two more long roundtrips through the snow? This decision was harder than it sounds, as either choice involved suffering.
The building with the better laundry facilities was smaller, farther away, and always full. The one slightly closer to me had an entire three washers and three dryers, but was in laundry hell, in an unfinished, non-climate controlled basement. Although busy, you usually had a decent shot at landing a washer, because who wanted to come here? There were no chairs, and no tables to fold your clothes. It was hard to do your homework unless you had reading to do, because the only place to sit was on the floor, with unpainted drywall as your backrest. If you left, you’d better set a timer, because if you were 10 seconds late, your might find your clothes stacked in a pile somewhere by some unwashed fellow student. But really, who wanted to stay in this frozen basement?
For those of us who stayed, there was little entertainment apart from the graffiti scribbled in pen or pencil on the unfinished drywall. I guess it was fair game, a challenge to the university to come and finally paint the damn thing.
Laundry Room Graffiti was apparently different from Bathroom Graffiti because instead of things like:
For a good time, call 555-1212. Ask for Sharon.
Flush hard, it’s a long way to the cafeteria!
I’ll be at the glory hole every day at 430pm!
There were comments like:
How much more money do our parents have to pay to get a couple of fucking chairs down here?
Why do I have to wear my ski jacket in the laundry room?
NOTICE: Today, December 13th, Washer #2 is fucked. Don’t use it, I already called it in. (These notices had their own special dedicated section of unpainted drywall, and were very helpful. We learned to always consult them before doing our laundry.)
Once in a while, with the number of engineers and scientists around there, there were analyses penciled onto the wall, complete with worked out advanced mathematical equations. I’ll paraphrase here:
Assuming a dryer makes 8kW of heat, and assuming that 6kW of heat escapes the dryer vent to the outdoors, if you convert to BTUs, or British Thermal Units, assuming the dimensions of this room and the area of uninsulated window glass, then each dryer should contribute 2000 BTUs of heat directly into the room, which means that if you want to be warm you should crawl into the fucking dryer.
And, in another section, there were a few entries that I still remember verbatim:
Meanwhile, Tonto, disguised as a doorknob, comes off in the Lone Ranger’s hand.
Meanwhile, Tonto, disguised as a canoe, strokes himself twice and shoots off across the lake.
Little jewels, these.
Meanwhile, I scribbled two of my own before leaving that year, thoughts courtesy of my high school Physics and Astronomy teacher:
What's the difference between a duck?
Is it farther to New York than it is by train?
By the way, these two questions do have answers, and they are “A Giraffe”, and “Yes”.
PS: Despite the ordeal of doing laundry in my building, nothing excused the guy around the corner down the hallway, who kept a shoulder-high permanent pile of dirty laundry on the floor in the middle of his room. If he had his door open, the bitter stank mountain of clothes smell could be detected long before reaching his room. I swear you could tell if his door was open from at least 30 feet away. (You truly learned to hold your breath when walking by.)
The kicker was the time when I walked by his room, only to catch him, shirtless, digging into the pile, looking through, pulling out dirty shirts and smelling, trying to find a supposedly wearable shirt.
I am not making this up. Ewww.
He had a girlfriend, too. No comment.
PS #2: When the pile mysteriously disappeared roughly once each semester, you knew his parents were coming that weekend.
