Laundromat ethics

Today I went to the laundromat, a trip which although less than exciting, is something I don't typically mind all that much. Today was a different story, though. The weather has been miserable for the past few days, with highs in the 50s. For some reason, the laundromat people hadn't gotten the message, and they were running the air conditioners full blast. It was freezing cold in there. I heard a lot of people complaining about it, but as with most laundromats, there is only one person on duty, usually an individual of questionable intellect and limited authority to actually do anything. As a result, we all just had to deal with the arctic temperatures. I actually lingered around the dryers for a while just trying to soak up some of the ambient heat.

Doing laundry, it turns out, is not cheap. So this week I decided to condense everything down to two loads instead of my usual three. I had realized that the washers were higher capacity than I have been giving them credit for and I decided to push them to their limits. My efforts to be frugal backfired, though, when I got seriously mixed up about which washers I was using and inadvertently put detergent into three washers and bleach into two of those. My load of whites was already started at this point, so I couldn't open it and redistribute; I couldn't move my darks into a washer that was about to dispense bleach, and so I was stuck with an extra washer. I considered just walking away from the situation, but I knew my conscience would trouble me with worries about whether some poor soul had subsequently used that washer and inadvertently bleached a load of jeans or something. Plus, there was a man there who was just staring at me, probably wondering why I was going around haphazardly putting detergent into empty washers. Good question.

I finally sucked it up, put $1.75 in the extra washer, and ran it empty to flush out the detergent and bleach. Ridiculous-- sometimes I wonder why I even try.