Column: Residence hall laundry not up to par

By Hannah Spaar

Published Feb. 26, 2010

Four hours in the middle of the night is not an acceptable time frame for anything, let alone laundry.

Unfortunately, four hours is the amount of time I spent doing laundry last week in the basement of my residence hall. If someone told me they spent four hours doing laundry I would imagine they hoarded clothes or somehow disastrously over-sudsed. The latter is what my friends and family assumed on hearing my story, knowing my knack for catastrophe in daily tasks.

The reality: There aren't nearly enough working dryers in Hatch residence hall.

Although the number varies, last week there were three completely broken dryers in Hatch. I say completely broken because they would not work at all, whereas the others took two to three cycles to dry the loads. One dryer did its job in one cycle.

Needing to put clothes through a second cycle shouldn't be necessary. It costs money, it wastes time and it further clogs the cycle of people trying to move their newly washed clothes from the washing machines to the dryers.

If there's one thing more annoying than having to spend extra money and extra time to get dry clothes, it's waiting for a dryer only to have it produce still-wet clothing. I spent far too much time counting down the minutes on dryers so I could swoop in and get my clothing started. Upstairs in my room, I was attempting to finish writing an essay due the next morning, so every minute I spent downstairs was not just a waste of my life but a waste of precious paper-writing time. I actually did have something much more important to be doing than standing around waiting for the dryers to actually do their job.

I'm not a math person in the slightest, but I can figure out there are not enough dryers in the basement if they are all working. There is exactly the same number of washers and dryers. Washing a load of laundry takes half the time it does to dry a load of laundry. When the laundry room is full, as it often is, this causes a lot of backup.

I've asked around, and Hatch isn't the only residence hall with laundry problems. A friend in Schurz residence hall claims it is always busy and has just as many problems. A friend in Cramer residence hall has to go to another building to do her laundry, which is just as bad in this frigid weather.

I'm not claiming to have any answers to this problem. The common sense first task is to make sure that what we do have is kept in good condition so there aren't any unnecessary problems.

After the basics, it falls a little outside my realm of knowledge. There isn't much room downstairs to begin with, and it would probably need a different type of washer to be able to accommodate more dryers, as the ones we have now are large full-bodied units that shake and sound like airplanes. Compared to the stacked style of the dryers, these seem to take up unnecessary space. Again, I claim no expertise on the subject and could be completely wrong.

What I do know is I'd like to be assured the extra dollar that goes in for each attempt at the dryers would actually go toward solving the problem instead of to some unknown fund for MU.