Laundry Fail

On Sunday I decided I had to do laundry. OK, that’s not the whole truth. It wasn’t so much a decision as it was an act made mandatory by my fairly ripe smell. Laundry intimidates me and I tried to put it off as long as possible. But it had been almost three weeks, which means I’d worn every outfit more than once. And I’d say I trekked the hell-hill to work five or six times in those clothes. So it was desperate times for laundry.

Why does laundry intimidate me, you ask? I’ve never done it on my own. It’s always been mom and dad’s washer and dryer. I’ve known how to operate them since I was 11. Yeah, I did laundry once at the Ocean City Laundromat, but Chris Moore was there to help me. It’s easy when someone else tells you where the quarters go. Laundry in France? They don’t even have quarters. How was this going to work? And I was all alone. No one to help me. Humph.

So I walked to the nearest laverie (Laundromat) and took a look around. There were 8 washers and 4 huge dryers. And there was a pay center too, which was a big wall with lots of numbers, a place for money to go in, and a place that looked like it was where a card would come out. Of course, everything was written in French, and I doubted I would be able to read it. So I tried to figure it out with logic. It seemed to me that if I put money into this wall, a card would come out the slot, and the card would be good for one cycle. Or maybe some tokens would come out, like at Chuck E Cheese. I would then walk over to my washer and insert my shiny new card or tokens. OK, I thought, as I deposited my money into the machine. I win at laundry.

After I put my money in, I didn’t get anything. Then I realized I had to choose my washer. So I picked my lucky number 4. I heard something drop into the slot where I thought my card or my tokens would be, but it was just my change. I waited patiently until I heard water running. Yep, washer #4 had started, and my clothes were still in their laundry bag on top of the machine! I tried to open the door, but it was tightly closed until the end of the cycle. 4 Euros gone. Damn. I don’t want to grieve too much over 4 Euros, but it’s not like I have all that much right now.

So I loaded my clothes into washer 1 and repeated the process. I was worried I would screw up the dryer system too, because I was running out of money, and it would suck to return home with wet clothes. Luckily for me, all went well with that.

You know what the worst part was about the whole laundry fiasco? As I was waiting for my clothes to finish, I spent a lot of time looking at the signs. And you know what? I could read all of them. Maybe if I hadn’t been so worried about not speaking French I would have realized that the instructions were mostly pictures, and the process was so easy a caveman could do it.

Oh well, c’est la vie.