“Where Is Everyone?” Asks Student Who Just Finished Load of Laundry
After two months, Owen Davis had finally figured it out. On the morning of January 20, 2020, the RGG resident looked in his dresser only to realize that he had run out of clean clothes. He pulled the cleanest-smelling shirt from his laundry basket and went commando in jeans to his 2 classes that day. He then forgot about his laundry until 10:30 pm that night. “It’s fine,” he figured. “I’ll be done in an hour and a half. A half hour for washing and an hour for drying, right?”
Owen did not emerge from the laundry room until the morning of March 23. I had the opportunity to interview him over Zoom to see how his situation unraveled.
“When I went down there at first, all the machines were taken, so I put my clothes on top of one that was almost finished running and went back up to my room to grab a snack. By the time I got back downstairs, someone else had started a new load in the machine. So I went to the next machine and went up to the lounge to wait.”
It took Owen a week to finally find an open machine.
“You see, I loaded up my colors into one of the washers and tried swiping my card. Then it said to swipe again, so I did. Then it showed a blank loading screen for 10 minutes until it gave me a connection error. So I tried using another machine. And another. Turns out, all of the machines are like this.”
It took over a month for Owen to finally get his laundry into a working machine and start it.
“By this time, I was getting sort of fed up with the whole thing. Then my RA came into the room and asked if I had downloaded the app. I said, ‘what app?’ So she had to explain how to download it and how it worked.”
Due to the slow internet connection in the laundry rooms, it took weeks for Owen to make a CSCPayMobile account and load money onto it.
“I had taken my homework down there, so I started to get ahead on work while I waited for the machines to run. I did all my Power readings through 7th week, so I should be set for a while. What day is it, by the way? I haven’t been getting calls, texts, or emails while I’ve been doing laundry. The wifi is just terrible down there. So anyway, I finally realized that I have a ton of quarters in my backpack because I’ve been paying for my coffee in cash. I ran out of Maroon dollars last week because I always bought myself breakfast after Kuvia.”
“I’m just excited to get back to my classes and see my house friends again. We’re planning a trip to Europe next quarter!”
“What’s up, guys? Sorry that took so long!”
“Guys?”
“Hello?”
