By Mitch Riportella

Doing laundry in Ross is not only overpriced but unnecessarily frustrating. Washing my clothes has never given me any great pleasure, but with such a flawed system in place, I find myself putting it off until I absolutely have to.
Washing and drying clothes is already a lengthy process, and students often have to wait for washers to open up due to a lack of machinery.
‘There’s not enough washers and dryers down there,” Seth Wells said. “I’ll sit there waiting for 30 minutes, and nothing will open up.”
Considering how small the washers are, it is not uncommon for me to have to do two or three loads at a time. From my observations, that amount seems to be pretty standard for most kids, so really there can be no more than four or five people at once. In a place where approximately 500 people need to occasionally do a load of laundry, I think it’s fair to say we either need some bigger washers, or there needs to be more of them.
Even the act of trying to pay for a cycle can be infuriating for some students.
“I always have to swipe my credit card like four times, because it’s always a bad read,” Jake Hoyer said. “Its really frustrating.”
But once you finally do manage to claim an open machine and then get it working, there is also another obstacle. The dryers don’t actually dry anything.
“My clothes are always soaking wet,” said Hoyer, “I have to hang them all around my room for them to dry.”
I have also adapted this strategy of hanging damp shirts and hoodies around the room.
From my experience, the size of the load or the type of clothes doesn’t seem to really effect how thoroughly it dries. Sometimes the machine simply decides to dry and sometimes it doesn’t. But more often than not, you will end up with soggy clothes.
There is no reason that these dryers shouldn’t be able to handle a load and a half from the obnoxiously small washing machines. Especially since we are all paying for this service, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in expecting the dryer to actually dry my clothes. This may seem like a tiny nuisance, but having to hang up individual pieces of clothing every time I do laundry is very time consuming and a waste of money.
This is only a problem in Ross. Schwitzer resident Lauren DeShaw said the dryers work just fine there.
I really don’t believe Butler is justified in charging residents of Ross for using the machines. Ross already has no air conditioning, it has no dining hall, and it simply does not live up to the quality of the other dorms. That being said, room and board for Ross is almost identical to the upperclassmen dorms. For example it’s only 300 dollars a year more to live in Residential College according to the Butler website. I feel Butler students already aren’t getting their money’s worth with Ross, so having to pay for laundry just feels like I’m being nickeled and dimed.
But if Butler insists on making us pay to do our laundry, the process should at the very least work.
“For how much were paying for it,” said Hoyer, “it should be better.”