The laundry room in Buckingham Hall on the University of Colorado Boulder’s campus. (Alexia Bailey/CU Independent)
This piece is from the CU Independent’s opinion section. Any opinions or views do not represent the CU Independent.
Alexia: Hi! I’m Alexia Bailey, a freshman here at CU Boulder. While I may just be getting started, I’m here to share everything I’ve picked up so far, which is a surprising amount of information. “What’s Eating at Alexia” is my unofficial and unfiltered guide to some of the things that being a CU Boulder Buff brings. Think of it as your guide to navigating everything that makes CU Boulder, well, CU Boulder. Whether you’re a freshman finding your footing or a senior with “no body, no crime” level grievances about finals week, I’m here to share my takes, tips and honest observations on everything from the sometimes-unpredictable Buff Bus system to navigating campus protests (or dodging them entirely). College is a wild, unforgettable ride, and “What’s eating at Alexia” is here to make sense of some of it, one opinion at a time.
We’re finally in the homestretch of the second semester, and look, I’ve been quiet on this topic for long enough. The laundry situation – to put it simply here – makes me want to hide under my covers and never come out. It’s awful. Between the broken appliances, stolen laundry and the complete and utter lack of laundry etiquette: you’re killin’ me, Buffs. I used to think that doing laundry was a simple task, so simple in fact that even my fifteen-year-old brother could handle it if he tried. However, since coming here, I’ve been proven wrong time and time again.
You see, here at the University of Colorado Boulder, we are lucky enough to have free washers and dryers within the dormitories. But what good are these washers and dryers if they break? I could tell you countless stories of this happening, such as during Thanksgiving break when I walked into the laundry room to grab my clothes from the dryer. I looked down, and there was a puddle of washer water on the floor. Or last week, when I walked into the laundry room to cycle my clothes from the washer to the dryer and the dryer was suddenly out of order.
In my specific laundry room, there is an app called “CSC ServiceWorks” that you can download to place the work order for the machines to be fixed. But this app is useless if no one uses it. You would think that people would be prompted to download and use this app when they see a literal puddle of water coming from the washer, but instead, a kind of bystander effect takes place. Now for those of us not in a psychology or sociology course right now, the bystander effect is the theory that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim if they are in the presence of other people. In this case, the victim is the appliance and the people living in this dorm are the unhelpful individuals. We all believe that someone else is going to step up and place the work order, but when everyone believes this, no one actually does. I implore you, my dearest friends, that when you see a broken washer or dryer, to scan whatever you have to scan, alert your Resident Advisors and do what you absolutely must. By being someone who actually tries to fix the problem, the problem is ten times more likely to be fixed.
Another issue I have with these stupid dorm laundry rooms is the giant issue of stolen laundry. It is one thing to take someone’s laundry out of the machine if they are taking over twenty minutes to grab their clothing, but to take someone’s laundry out and go “shopping” in that pile of laundry is something completely different. It’s not just completely rude; it’s theft. I firmly believe that you can never truly know what someone is going through at any given moment. If taking someone’s clothes means taking everything they have, it makes you an absolutely horrible person. Why would you ever do that to someone? Yes, we live in a country where it is hard to get basic necessities, but if you need clothes, I can happily point you in the direction of a Goodwill. Stealing someone’s clothes could ruin their entire day or even their life. Clothes often have memories attached to them, and by stealing those clothes, you may be stealing more than just a shirt or a pair of jeans. You could be stealing someone’s dead father’s shirt or someone’s most favorite pair of cat-themed socks.
The last issue that I feel the need to talk about is the one that I feel most passionate about. This is the one hill I might actually die on, folks, and that hill would be the lack of laundry etiquette that some dorm residents have. I think that when you first move in the dorms, you are generally clueless on what to do when it comes to dorm laundry. But how clueless are we this far in? I mean, COME ON. It should be common sense to set a timer for your clothes. It should be common sense to not occupy all the washers and dryers at once. It should be common sense to pick up your literal underwear from the floor of the laundry room. You aren’t Charli XCX, nor are you Billie Eilish, I do not want to see the color of your underwear. Unfortunately, our mothers are not here to clean up after the messes we make or to do the things we forget to do. This is a fact that some of you, almost a year in now, have yet to realize.
Overall, I know that doing laundry sucks; I truly do. But it would suck exponentially less if you set a timer, did one load at a time and picked up after yourselves. If we did all that, the world might be a better place. Maybe then, it’ll even be less washed up – if you’re catching my drift there.
Contact CU Independent Assistant Opinion Editor Alexia Bailey at alexia.bailey@colorado.edu.
