COLUMN: Laundry schemers, wet underwear make life miserable

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by Packy Saunders

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IT IS amazing how many people can integrate, optimize, theorize and philosophize, yet cannot complete the simple task of doing a load of laundry. There are three categories of laundry deviants: those who cannot launder, those who can launder yet choose not to and those who use selfish schem-ing to ensure exclusive personal access to washers and driers.

Category I. Let's address the people who can't use the machines. In the prototypical model of domesticity, some elder family member or friend takes the college-bound upstart and instills in him or her the laundering basics.

The most fundamental laundry room know-how is color separation. There are foolish people who have not yet figured out that white and red makes you see red. If you have ever seen some poor fool walking out of the laundry room with a freshly ruined basket of lights and former whites, you know this (God forbid that the person was you). Remember this.

Temperature selection is the second lesson of laundering basics. The lighter the color, the hotter the water. Conversely, the darker the color of the garment, the colder the water. Or to keep it simple, just don't use hot water for anything but white socks and pungent sports gear. Colors fade and bleed in hot water; and just about everything shrinks in it.

By the way, if you just finished playing some sand or dirt-oriented sport like volleyball, shake the sand out of the garment before putting it in the washer. Duh.

Now that the stuff is clean, dry it. Never overload a dryer. It can spin for hours and never do anything but waste electricity if there are too many garments filling the bin. Be careful with towels and jeans. They should be packed into the dryer even more loosely than other items.

For the more advanced users, adding a fabric-softening sheet has the potential to make clothes softer. I do not recommend it as I think that the whole industry pulled this technology out of the air to increase revenues.

Club soda, lemon juice or any of the commercial stain removers are most functional on stains if you use them immediately. Once a stain sets, not even ancient Chinese secrets can get it out.

Also, never put linen, rayon, silk or any other delicate in the drier -- not even on its most gentle setting. The "delicate" setting is misleading. The only true way to preserve the condition of these items is to dry them on a hanger or line.

Category II. Most of you do your own laundry and should have skipped over that first part. But among those of you who can launder, there are many who will not. We all have sat next to someone in class who decided that the jeans they last washed in February were the cleanest that they had available. I wonder about the people who have one pair of jeans but 34 pairs of boxer shorts.

It's a simple equation: Wear your shoes without socks, wear each pair of boxers twice and air-out those jeans. With the average collection of Beer-Bike, O-Week and college T-shirts numbering 76.1, a two- month laundry-free wardrobe is available with minimal recycling.

Let me say that no matter how many of you all do this, it does not make it right. It may sound like I am picking on the guys. But just ask a close female friend when the last time she washed her favorite bra was, and you may get an answer that you do not like.

Category III. As if the people listed above weren't annoying enough, there is an even more sinister group of Rice people; those who for selfish gain seek to disturb the natural order of the laundry room. These are most loathsome creatures -- the laundry schemers.

Have you ever opened a drier to find someone else's clothing in it? Upon further examination, you find your missing garments resting on top of another machine and sopping wet!? My friend Brandon has the solution to this problem: vindication. Brandon just takes the offending person's load and sprinkles it about the laundry room. If more people practiced this form of vigilante non-tolerance, the laundry room might evolve into a safer place.

Another crime often committed by the schemer-type launderer is "the fake." I was not aware of this move until some friends from Sid informed me of the atrocities occurring consistently in the SRC laundry room. You see, some idiots run an empty drier while they wash their clothing. This way the drier is vacant when the washing cycle is completed.

If I wasted electricity like that at home, my dad would make me pick up the bill. Sadly enough, we all pick up the bill for these people. Why do you think the campus housing portion of your bill is so high? Because of the cozy accommodations or because utilities are outrageously expensive in Houston? Unfortunately, you cannot easily target the culprits. Maybe Brandon has a strategy for vengeance.

Now on to the last schemer-type in Category III. The thief. The thief takes your clothes. Usually it is done on purpose, but other times garments are snatched by mistake. The unintentional culprit then decides that your clothes are worth keeping or that the trip to the basement is too much of a strain. Then it's "good-bye" favorite jeans.

That's gotta hurt. Especially if those were your only pair of jeans -- the ones you were washing for the first time since February.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the April 12, 1996 issue.

Copyright © 1996 The Rice Thresher. All Rights Reserved.
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