A State of Detergency

Doing laundry is a tiresome business. Weekly, I lug piles of dirty clothing down the stairs to Weld basement, greeted each time by the same blast of heat and rhythmic ka-thump of wet articles. But it’s not the sweltering air that disturbs me, nor the abundance of lone socks littering the floor. It’s other students’ failure to grasp basic laundry etiquette that frightens me time and time again. It seems that most undergrads had never handled a Tide bottle before arriving here in Cambridge; they exhibit the same blatant lack of conscientiousness in laundry rooms across campus. From Thayer to Quincy, Lowell to Cabot, this immaturity is rife at Harvard, and doesn’t seem to end until graduation (if at all).

Washers and dryers are in high demand at peak hours, like Sunday afternoon and Thursday night. Students, overwhelmed by pressing commitments, naturally want to load and leave as quickly as possible. So, with all machines “in use,” it’s tempting to drag others’ clothes haphazardly from washers as soon as they stop spinning, and throw them out of the way. It takes only an extra 30 seconds to remove the load carefully, instead of dumping piles of dripping pants, underwear and towels onto a dust covered countertop (losing a sock in the process).

On the flip side, the average drying cycle lasts about 56 minutes. No one expects fellow students to time their loads to the minute, returning to fetch clean clothes at the exact moment of completion. Most of us run on incredibly tight schedules, and don’t factor in a two-hour wash-and-dry endeavor every week. When it’s a question of wearing that same pair of dirty underwear for the third day in a row, or starting a dryer cycle you know conflicts with a Gov tutorial, hopefully you choose the latter. But leaving laundry to deflate all afternoon while you enjoy a “quick” study break at Boloco is just rude.

Laundry room transgressions happen anonymously. But just because there’s no face attached to the clothing you soil, that doesn’t make its owner any less real—nor any less angry. Maybe you’ve sat next to that pair of pants in section, or complained to that sweatshirt about a dining hall’s less-than-delicious “seasoned hake,” or even met that blouse through a mutual friend. We live in one big community, eating, sleeping, and working in close quarters. It’s shocking to me that the same person who has kept me waiting for two hours before unloading his dryer last Tuesday must be among those friendly classmates I’ve bonded with over the past months.

Unfortunately, this attitude is not confined to the laundry room. We’ve all witnessed students as they knock over soda bottles, look around to see if anyone else noticed, and then fail to clean up after themselves. Or we reach under a desk only to find a sticky wad of gum greeting unsuspecting fingertips. Such behavior reeks of seven-year-old self-centeredness. Supposedly, Harvard students are above that.

But this speaks to a more general problem: Too often, students view one another as obstacles or means to an end. It’s the same kind of mentality on display in the New York subway as travelers scramble and shove past one another to squeeze onto trains. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that communities, from New York City to Harvard, operate largely on goodwill; We are each partially responsible for the (un)pleasantness of our surroundings. No one is going to force you to be considerate, and it’s not something you can put on your resume. But nonetheless, acting with basic decency towards one another adds a little warmth to a campus that can otherwise feel cold and impersonal. Creating this sense of community should be a priority, not an inconvenience.



Molly M. Strauss ’11, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Straus Hall.