Today in the things I worry about:

Like I mentioned, I moved. I was living in a studio apartment that was attached to someone's house, but now I'm in a complex. It's a concept that dates back thousands of years to Ancient Rome, and yet nobody's yet been able to solve the "living with other people" aspect of it.

Pictured: the best we can do...evidently.

Yeah, the whole post is about laundry.
It's been fourteen years, I'm out of ideas.

Mine is a question of laundry etiquette. The washers and dryers are available between eight in the morning and nine at night, after which you're not supposed to use them because of, I assume, the noise. This morning, I went to put my laundry in at eight sharp. Yeah, I'm that guy. Look, I just want to get it out of the way, you know? So I put mine in the washers, but the dryers are still full of someone's clothes. Ok, so presumably they put a load in last night and didn't take it out, and that's whatever. So I start the washers and come back in half an hour.

Like, for four full minutes...

Of course that person's stuff in still in the dryers. Of course it is. I have two options before me: to wait while my wet laundry slowly molders away and picks up that gross musty smell that wet laundry is want to do, or pull their stuff out, set it on top and get on with my day. I chose the latter. Their clothes were still damp which is a whole other story about handling a strangers' unmentionables, but I took them out anyway, and then washed my hands, like for awhile. And I mean, I don't know what heat settings they want, and I kind of don't want to pay for their load.

In case anyone was unclear where
the line must be drawn, it's here.

There are four washers and four dryers for a building with something like twenty-two apartments. There are one and two bedroom units, possibly three bedrooms, but let's be conservative--as in estimate on the low end, not storm the Capitol building--and guess that there are eleven one-bedrooms and eleven two-bedrooms, so maybe, I don't know, between forty and fifty humans in total generating two loads of laundry a week. What's the protocol here? Just wait while they sleep in? Total anarchy and musty laundry.

So am I the worst? I ask as I sit in my apartment waiting for my stuff to dry, racked with worry that someone is going to be mad at me for touching their laundry. What should I have done? Well, ok, sought therapy. Fair enough. I shouldn't be rehearsing imagined encounters with my neighbor over their laundry habits. But seriously, did I do the right thing? Validate me!

"You wrote about this experience on your blog?
That's interesting, and do people still read...blogs?"

-some therapist