The laundry room is a terrifying place. Photo by Katerina Anderson
MEGAN DRAKE | OPINION COLUMNIST | medrake@butler.edu
My least favorite time of the week is when I have to do laundry at Butler. This is because of my hatred for the Butler dryers.
Laundry at Butler is a process, to say the least. The laundry rooms are always aggressively dirty and almost always overpopulated. The floors are coated with a thin layer of grime, a mysterious smell emanates from the washers, and it is without fail packed with students waiting on their laundry.
Ava Palo, a first-year marketing and applied business technology double major, spoke on how simply entering the laundry room is not an enjoyable experience.
“It’s never clean in the laundry room,” Palo said. “There’s just hair and detergent on the floor always, and I always need to take a shower after I go in.”
Yes, even the washers are gross; they are inexplicably sticky and always covered in hair and mold. However, my problem is really with the dryers. People do not take their lint out, let their clothes sit in the machines for hours and throw dryer sheets, papers and Tide pods everywhere. If you do any of these things I’m listing, take this as an opportunity for self-improvement, and change immediately.
The lack of cleanliness in the laundry rooms is horrendous, and yet it is the least of my problems. I have had far too many casualties at the hands of the Butler dryers, and repurchasing clothing is getting quite annoying.
Using the dryers is quite the toss-up. Your clothes will either come out with holes burned through them, or they will still be wet. Either way, Butler dryers are not making your already difficult life easier.
Ava Laufersky, a sophomore elementary education major, talked about how laundry at Butler can be perpetually frustrating.
“[My clothes] either come out dry from the washer or wet from the dryer,” Laufersky said. “There’s nothing that makes sense about that, but that’s how it works.”
This is tragically the truth. When I open the dryer to find that my clothes are still wet, the defeat I feel at that moment is astronomical. Then I am laying my wet clothes all over my room because I do not have time to run the dryer again.
Anna Gritzenbach, a first-year exploratory studies major, talked about the losses she faced in the Butler dryer battlefield.
“They burn holes through my socks weekly,” Greitzenbach said. “I’ve gone through so many pairs of socks.”
Nothing makes my week worse than putting away my laundry and finding my favorite pair of Bombas socks went up in flames during their 40-minute stay in a Butler dryer. We should not be having to replace our clothes weekly because the dryers are torching my laundry.
Even when the dryers are not ruining my clothing, laundry at butler is overpriced. I spend around five dollars a week to just wash and dry my clothes, let alone my sheets and towels. This is just another expense that Butler requires students to pay, and students are provided with dirty and non-working laundry machines.
Not only do we have to worry about damaged clothes, but finding an open dryer is remarkably difficult. I set a timer when I do my laundry and am promptly back in the laundry room to retrieve my clothes when it goes off. Disappointingly, however, my peers are not the same.
We are all busy with class and so many other activities, and many of us do not have time to let our clothes marinate in the washer. Some of us can not wait for the person who leaves their clothes in the dryer to come to get their stuff so we can dry our own clothes.
People who let their clothes sit are only contributing to the horrendous conditions of the laundry room. Letting your clothes simmer in the nasty, warm, dark washing machines is only creating a breeding ground for yet another Butler stench.
So tragically for you, I’m gonna move your clothes out of the dryer. I’m not a horrible person; I would only move it if there are no other dryers and your stuff has been done for over 20 minutes. But nonetheless, I have moved clothes, and I will continue to do so in the future.
Laufersky talked about when and why it’s okay to move people’s clothes.
“I think if you’re not moving the washing process along, you’re just causing problems for everyone else,” Laufersky said. “And I think it is okay at that point to move clothes.”
The washers and dryers really work together to make campus residents’ lives slightly more difficult. When I have a bad week, the last thing I want to do is to hang dry all of my clothes because they are still sopping wet, although I spent $1.50 to dry them.
The solutions are relatively simple. Butler could have the dryers maintained more frequently so they work and stop ruining students’ clothes or just provide us with nicer dryers. If the people stop trashing the laundry room, would pick up after themselves and empty out the lint, we would all be having a better experience.
Some small changes can make a large difference in the quality of life for students using the awful Butler dryers. Essentially, I know I’m not alone in saying: I always have hated the Butler dryers, and I probably always will.
