The horrors of doing laundry at NYU

Remember all those days when your mom did your laundry for you?

Or when you had the luxurious glory of doing your own — folding clothes and carelessly throwing in a dryer sheet halfway through a load?

Or even when, for three of four blissful years, you didn’t even know what a washing machine or a dryer was?

Well, if you once thought you didn’t remember them, you do as soon as you set foot on a college campus. And above all, you long desperately to return to them.

Before you come to college, you expect your most recurring memories to be the parties, the sporting events, the final realizations of true love.

But no.

You soon discover that what you will really remember will be your experiences in the laundry room. In that sauna-like trap of banging machines and near-explosions you begin to equate with hell.

At first, you wonder why you have to swipe your card backwards down a crooked machine to get anything to work. But you shrug your shoulders and you move on to more important things. Like making sure you return to retrieve your clothes before the 37 minutes have elapsed. Because the machine says it will be 37 minutes until the wash cycle is over, so they will be finished then, right?

Wrong. You realize you’ve made a horrible mistake. That when you return after 43 minutes, panicked that your shirts and pink polka-dotted boxers with the un-removable salsa stain will be thrown across the room, the wash cycle still has one minute left. You breathe a sigh of relief, thanking the washer for its miscommunications.

But after you’ve waited for what surely has been five minutes, you begin to get confused. Finally, when the machine’s door clicks to let you retrieve your clothes, you realize it has been seven thousand minutes and you’ve already missed your first week of classes. Oh, well, you say. The clothes are wet so you must dry them — classes aside.

But then you realize they aren’t wet — they’re merely damp. What happened during all those minutes? Where did the water go? Again, you shrug and move on with your life. The dryer says to return in 60 minutes, so you give it at least 75. But when you come in, your socks are strewn across the room, a bundle of clothes lies on top of the dryer and, yes, the salsa boxers are stuck in the dryer door. Another student has betrayed you. Or, has it actually just been the laundry room itself? You consider the fact that it is, after all, underground in your building’s basement, so it would make sense for the devil to live there.

You grab your clothes and feel they are much too hot even to touch. Their edges are crumpled, seeming almost to crack with your touch. Then it hits you: they’re actually burned. And they’re two sizes smaller than you remember. You tell yourself that it must be hell, and you grab your clothes in a fury and run for the elevator.

You decide the burns on your arms from holding them are better than an eternity of flames. It’s time to leave the clothes on your bed and see what’s happening in the second week of classes. You’ll be right back there next week, sitting and having a glass of sour air with the devil — looking at seven out of ten machines that do not work.