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Doing laundry. A time honored, once-a-month tradition carried on from generation to generation of college students. A sometimes rude awakening for college freshmen is that mom will no longer does the laundry for you. You actually have to wash your own clothes. Not only do you have to wash them, you have to wash them in the right combinations! You can’t wash certain colors with other colors because apparently they just don’t get along. Then you have to buy your own detergent and make sure it’s the right kind of detergent, it doesn’t just appear anymore. And even after that, your task is not complete. Then you have to take the clothes from the washer to the dryer, making sure to use the correct temperature and that certain clothes don’t go into the dryer. However, before you can put your clothes into these machines, you have to pay! No longer do your clothes magically appear on your bed, freshly laundered for free. Now you must do it yourself and you must pay for it. And you pay not once, but twice, once to wash and once again to dry.
Having returned to school this semester, I was very dismayed to find out that the already seemingly high price of laundry had actually increased. Now you must pay $1.25 for each load of laundry. After this discovery, I was extremely angry. “The university wants me to pay even more money to wash my clothes when all this summer I did it for free at home?”
However, upon closer inspection and a phone call to the housing office, I found out that these new-fangled machines are more efficient than the machines found across campus last year. These new machines can hold more clothes than their predecessors. What’s this? I don’t have to shove all my clothes into one machine in an attempt to save time and money? My clothes will comfortably fit into one washer now? They’ll actually be clean and not just wet? And the new dryers, they also hold more clothes, so your clothes will come out of the dryer and will actually be dry. Kiss the days of transforming your dorm room into a clothesline goodbye.
And the laundry detergent situation, these machines only require two tablespoons of detergent, whereas the older machines required just about one half cup of detergent. Now after doing some very rigorous math, I figured out that with the new machines, you can do four loads of laundry with the same amount of detergent it would have taken you to do just one. So, your bottle of detergent will last four times longer.
Also, the way these machines are set up is better for your clothes. In the old machines, clothes were beat up, the fabric softener mixed with the detergent and the bleach, doing God knows what to your precious wardrobe. The smart new washer is gentle with your clothes, preventing them from getting wrapped around the agitator. There are three separate compartments for your detergent, fabric softener and bleach which are stored until each one is needed at a different time. Also, these new machines use less water and are more energy efficient.
So, before you call home in hysterics and curse the university for taking more of your hard-earned money that you would have used for various other activities, remember that now your clothes are washed more gently, with less detergent. And now maybe you can do laundry once every two months, provided you have enough clean underwear and socks to last that long.
Molly Johnson is a junior journalism major.
