I hate doing laundry. Not so much the act of doing laundry itself…I mean, it’s not like I have to go down to the river & beat my clothes against a rock. But I hate the prep that’s involved in actually getting my clothes cleaned. See, our dryer is broken. We have a washer that operates fine, which is great for most of my wardrobe. I’d say I hang dry maybe half of my clothing anyway. T-shirts, sweaty yoga pants, unmentionables…they all get washed in cold & hung to dry. Its better for the fabric in the long run and on a warm day these things will be dry within a few hours. But there are some things that I can’t get away with hang drying. Towels, bedding, rugs, etc. need to go into a dryer. So, ultimately I end up putting off washing these things for as long as possible until I end up with a mountain of towels & sheets because I hate going to a public coin operated laundromat. To avoid going weekly, I have several sets of sheets and more towels than a family of 4 has.
So yesterday I got myself mentally prepared to head to the laundromat. I haven’t been since before Christmas. This required pre-sorting everything on the living room floor and making sure I had lots of quarters (because you can’t depend on the change machines to dispense all of your quarters and sometimes they eat your cash all together with. Plus you should always have extra quarters in case you put 4 of them into a dryer only to find out that for the past hour your towels have been tossed around with cold air blowing on them.) I had to go out to move my car so that I could load it with my huge, heavy basket of laundry and then schlepped detergent & fabric softener out to the car as well. I can get the entire laundry process done from start to finish in 2 hrs.
I arrived at the laundromat at 3:00 p.m. As I suspected, 3:00 p.m. on a Monday = ghost town. I’d be in and out of here quickly, which made me happy. No fighting over washers or dryers for me today. Yay! I loaded 4 washers with my stuff. As I was pouring detergent into the top of the front loading washers, in the mirror's reflection above the machines I noticed a young, thin Hispanic man with curly hair standing maybe 30 feet away from me. What caught my eye was that he was digging his nose. He wasn’t even trying to play it off like he was wiping his nose or he had an itchy nostril. He was digging away like he was at home alone! I was so shocked that he was just digging and digging and digging like this in public. I kept staring at him in the mirror hoping he would see me watching him and he’d be embarrassed and stop. But he never looked over. He just continued to dig. Then he finally stopped, but it was only to switch nostrils. He dug some more, and then did the unthinkable. He rolled his little treasures up into a ball between his thumb and index finger, then took his index finger and reached out for one of the laundry carts and wiped his booger on the chrome bar. He then continued to dig and roll and wiped more on the bar. I was beyond disgusted! This is a cart provided by the laundromat for patrons to put their clean clothes in and he’s painting it with boogers! I walked over to the paper towel dispenser and got some towels and walked up to him. “Here you go.” I said. “Thank you!” He said. “This is for you to wipe those boogers off the cart.” I said. He just looked at me. I turned and walked away. **sigh** I’ve got to get a dryer.
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