Scott Speaks

I hate doing my laundry in a laundromat.
There, I said it. I like having my own washer and dryer. I don’t like having to haul baskets full of dirty shirts, big bottles of tide, various stain removers, and stuff to keep my ADD at bay. It’s like being in college again. Except more expensive. Quarters are like gold once again. I’ve tasted the freedom of keeping them around for parking meters, diet cokes and ding-dongs…and I don’t want to go back to hording every Washington coin I can find. I’m back to the days of tipping the coffee shop girl a dollar instead of the change…just so I can have the damn quarter. Alas, for lower rent and lower electric bills, this is the sacrifice I make. But honestly, after a few weeks of going to a real public facility…and not just a laundry room at an apartment complex, I’m starting to think of it as something fun to do. An explanation:

1. I can brush up on my Spanish. This is a unique experience at the Dillon Colorado laundromat, because I am always by far the minority. I live in an area largely populated by hispanic families, so everything around me tends to cater to both english and spanish speaking audiences. I find myself trying to read the instructions for the laundry machine, the handwritten warnings about leaving clothes behind, and numerous flyers offering employment (and sometimes thinking “hmmm…I COULD use the money…). I even try to hold small conversations with children, largely because I read Spanish at a kindergarden level, and even that’s stretching it. I do well for a couple sentences, but once in a while they say something I completely miss…so I say “¿que?” They usually just laugh and run away.
2. Kids are fun (but watch your stuff.) The parents don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about what they’re kids do, as long as they’re in the general area of the laundromat. Some kid ganked my dryer sheets (seriously. dryer sheets.) and ran out the door. I ran out to get them, and he didn’t even have them anymore. What the hell could he have possibly done with them in the meantime…I don’t know. Mom? Oblivious, nose deep into the soap opera of the dryer. Speaking of…
3. Watching laundry roll around is Zen-like. If you ever wanted to learn to mediate but could never find one thing to focus on to clear your head, then you haven’t tried it at a laundromat. Especially the front-load washers with the glass door. There is no reason it should be entertaining. At all. And yet, I’ll catch myself zoning out looking at them, often with a book in front of me which lost its place while I wasn’t paying attention. It’s sudsy, and it’s spin-y, and will the 2 brown socks ever get back together? No, the red hoodie is keeping them apart.
4. I get a lot of reading done. When I’m not looking at the washers. (I recommend reading American Shaolin. I’m totally addicted to that book right now.)
5. There’s neat stuff in the Silverthorne OfficeMax Plaza. Including a horrible Chinese place, a really sweet coffee shop with an impressive selection of loose-leaf teas and a hipster dude who can pull a wonderful shot of espresso, a Dairy Queen, Fiesta Jalisco (the only restaurant in Summit County who gives you a pitcher of ice water when you sit down. YOU WANT ICE WATER…SET IT OUTSIDE FOR A MINUTE. Good god, we live in an alpine climate, people), an OfficeMax (obviously), a bakery that’s never open, a liquor store owned by a crazy Korean dude, another horrible chinese place, and a Subway. If I do dare leave my laundry supplies and wet clothing in the hands of bored-as-hell children, there’s much to do.
6. Great people watching. People are generally idiots. And to me, that’s high comedy. My favorite so far: This place has awesome triple-load washers, so I can fit two weeks worth of shit in one load, for the nominal fee of $3.50, and then throw it in the triple-load dryer. Really, I can be in and out in 90 minutes. The amount of people who will take up like three triple-load washers to wash maybe three loads worth of laundry is astounding to me. They’re actually paying over 10 bucks just to wash their clothes once. And then they proceed to split it up into three, sometimes four, triple-load dryers. The directions are clearly in Spanish, and I obviously can’t correct them, so I just sit back and watch people pumping quarters into washers, going out to their car for more or asking everyone else if they have any extras (which they don’t, they put 10 bucks worth in the washers already).
7. The attendant is cool. It’s always the same lady, and she’s bilingual. Watching her chew out people in spanglish for starting laundry too late at night is priceless. Monday I was the last person there, and though my laundry was finished drying right when they closed, she let me hang out and fold everything. She found a crazy necklace in one of the giant lint traps, so I asked if she found cool stuff all the time. She showed me this huge box of crap kept in the office. Necklaces, keys, rings, pennies, buttons, what appears to be B.B.’s, and even some really weird stuff like a nice-looking watch, a cell phone, and…yes…a pack of condoms. None of it very valuable, but it’s not like anyone’s coming to retrieve this stuff. Insane.
8. In theory, you could entertain yourself like this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUFD4EgsbEg[/youtube]
So maybe it’s not so bad. But I tell you what…there’s days I’d sacrifice all that so I could have some twinkies out of a vending machine.