Laundry Etiquette

[marcmagus]

You live in a multi-family house with a single washer and a single dryer in the basement. You need to do laundry, but an unspecified person has left loads in both the washer and the dryer, which have run to completion and are sitting there. They have left a single small laundry bag sitting atop the dryer.

What do you do?

Comments

[herbertinc.livejournal.com]

Same thing I'd do in my apartment complex: Put the wet laundry on top of the dryer, and the dry laundry in the laundry bag. I wouldn't put the laundry in the dryer even if wasn't a coin-op, because drying preferences are diverse.

Love,
Herbert.

[annodomini.livejournal.com]

When living in a communal situation in which we shared a washer and dryer with several people, we put up a whiteboard with a Laundry Queue. Basically, whenever you put something into the washer and/or dryer, you wrote down your name, identifying information for the batch (underwear, darks, lights, bedclothes, or whatever), instructions for what you would like people to do if they found one of the cycles done (washer->dryer on low heat, or washer->drying rack, or dryer->green bag, or "come find me"), and contact information (phone number, email, "room 207", or whatever).

It worked well when people remembered to fill out the queue. Of course, when there were five batches of laundry in flight, and only three on the queue, you would start to run into some issues sorting everything out.

[soulchanger.livejournal.com]

Well, you've said "etiquette" and not "ethics," which rules out the first several impulses that I had in response to the question (those being arson, theft, vandalism, etc).

I might transfer each load of their laundry into some temporary object area until I was done with the machine that that load was in and then put each load back in the machine where I found it.

[muppetk.livejournal.com]

same thing I'd do here - in an apt building w/7washers & 6 dryers. Wait 5-10 min to see if whoever is on the ball and actually just about to come back or if they're being rude & a hog. If the latter - move the dry stuff to the bag (if it's actually dry, not just half dry), the wet to the dryer (in my case, would move both to the giant metal carts we have in the room here), and start using the washer. Someone hogging the laundry room sucks.

if your stuff finishes before the person comes back for their stuff, then move their stuff back to the washer. I probably wouldn't run the dryer myself because who knows how specific people are about such things. And they might come back and wonder where the heck their clothes are. I'd make sure to leave both the dryer and bag wide open so that their stuff is VISIBLE when the putz (or highly distracted housemate) walks back in and is confused.

[penguinkraft.livejournal.com]

I have so many phobias about other people touching my clean laundry and touching other people's laundry; it is not even funny. I think I would wait about 15 minutes and if I can't figure out who left the laundry, I would transfer their laundry from the washer to the dryer and start my laundry in the case that I am really pressed for time.

[pigfish.livejournal.com]

Dry into the bag, wet into the dryer (but probably not turn it on) and do my shizzz.

That said, (kinda relatedly) the secretary at my old job didn't speak to me for a month after I took her Lean Cuisine out of the microwave at work... I set it (covered!) next to the microwave, and she threw a shit fit. So you never can gauge an otherwise reasonable person's reaction.

[pigfish.livejournal.com]

Chris adds that he'd check if the stuff in the dryer was still hot to the touch. If so, he'd wait a bit, but if it's cold, then it's clear they've forgotten or been distracted, and then it's safe to proceede as above :)