re: #76 Nerdy Fish

When I was in college, with shared laundry facilities in the dorms, the rule was that you moved the previous guy’s stuff into a dryer or onto a table if the only idle machine had clothes in it, and then you made a good faith effort to wait for a bit to see if you could catch him and tell him where you moved the stuff. But that was a college dorm, where we were all expected to know each other and get along. I wouldn’t expect total strangers in a shared living environment to make any such effort.

You can still try.

When I was in a dorm the laundry room was shared by a *lot* of people with a large premium on dry usage since drying took so much longer than washing. So unattended clothing pretty quickly got moved into baskets or the mobile hampers. I tended to take a book down there with me and sit in a chair or on the washer while waiting for the wash cycle or drying to finish. (I often also accumulated clothes for a few weeks and then took them home to wash. Bonus if my mother was doing laundry since she’d wash mine as well - though I had no expectation of her to wash just my clothes.)

The apartment I lived in with a shared laundry room had a pretty good acceptance of clothes being moved from idle machines. I’d leave my basket next to the washer or dryer to facilitate that. And once I knew the cycle timing I’d usually be down to check on it within 5-10 minutes of it finishing.