laundry wars

I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone into the basement to get my stuff out of the dryer, only to find that our downstairs neighbors (who we share a basement and laundry facilities with) have pulled my stuff out of the dryer half-way through the cycle to put their stuff in.

Today it happened again, and whereas normally I’m in no particular hurry to get the laundry done, today we were trying to get some stuff done before we leave for the beach, and this delay means we can only do half of what we wanted to do.

So I went to the front door and knocked. And knocked. And knocked. Finally, she answered the door, in her bathrobe, and explained that she was about to jump in the shower. I apologized for interupting her, and said that I just wanted to ask that they quit pulling my clothes out of the dryer before they’re done.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” She said, “I needed to dry my jacket before work, and your socks seemed done!”

I explained that it wasn’t a big deal normally, but today we were trying to get some laundry done before leaving for a trip, so she’d prevented us from getting our stuff done.

Then she said that she felt like she was kind of in the same situation, since I pulled her jacket out of the washer.

Okay. I did pull her jacket out of the washer. The crucial difference here? Her washload was finished when I pulled her jacket out and set it aside in a laundry basket. My dryer load was only half-done when she pulled it out and dumped the soggy socks into a laundry bucket. Plus, she didn’t even put them back in the dryer when she finished with her jacket.

We went back and forth a couple of times, and I finally had to just mumble something and walk away, because I realized that she honestly didn’t see any difference between her deciding that drying her jacket took priority over my half-finished dryer load, and me taking her finished washload out of the washer.

I had a similar conversation with Eric and Jill the other night about how people just aren’t aware of the fact that other people have rights, and if you try to point it out to them, they just get indignant about their own rights.

Conclusion: I probably shouldn’t have pulled her jacket out. I probably should have just waited for her to finish her laundry on her own. However, I had a schedule to keep as well, and I know their laundry habits well enough to know that I had no way of knowing how soon she would come back to finish her laundry. They frequently leave stuff in the washer all day. But that is not the same as actually stopping my laundry load because her stuff is clearly more important than mine.

Shit like this infuriates me, and the fact that she honestly didn’t understand why I was irritated, and in fact felt like I should apologize to her only makes me more mad.