The Laundry Situation Needs to Be Fixed

Quite frankly, the laundry situation at Drew is horrible. Every time students need to do laundry, the process becomes a multi-hour struggle against the laundry machines and other students’ poor time management skills. No one wants to wake up to find they have no sweatpants, and doing the laundry should be a pain free process. 

There are several reasons doing laundry at Drew is nearly impossible, but they can all be summed up in a few major complaints: the machines just do not work, there are not enough machines and students do not seem to respect each other. 

The main qualm is that the washers and dryers are unusable. It is often better to know the machines are out of service, as that way everyone knows they are unusable and people will not waste their time using a dryer that leaves their clothes wet.

 For example, in McLendon, a washer and dryer were finally fixed after being broken for the entirety of the fall semester, but the “fixed” dryer still does not dry clothes. On various occasions, students have left items in the dryers for multiple hours and still ended up with soaked clothes. Students should not have to worry about wasting four hours with clothes in the dryer just to have to air dry them anyway. Some people even refuse to use the dryers because their clothes have been burnt too many times before. Having functioning laundry machines does not seem like too much to ask for, but at Drew, having more machines functioning than broken feels like a miracle.

Next, there are no buildings with the appropriate number of machines for the amount of residents living in the hall. Even over the summer, when residence halls are nowhere near capacity, students still have to wait an inordinate amount of time for washers to be free. It does not make sense that Drew expects the 159 students living in McLendon to share four washers and four dryers, especially since not all of them are guaranteed to be functional at the same time. Other schools have rows and rows of machines, so students do not have to factor an extra half hour into their day to wait for washers and dryers to free up.

Furthermore, while Drew Facilities’ management of the laundry rooms needs significant improvement, other students’ actions make the situation worse. All students have to do laundry, so the least people can do is be respectful enough to set timers so clothes do not sit in the washers and dryers for hours on end. Drew even has a whole website where students can check how much time it will take for the washer or dryer to finish if they forget. When we clearly do not have enough machines to accommodate everyone, it is even more important to be respectful of other people’s time. 

Finally, the disgusting state of the laundry rooms does not make sense. Take the extra 30 seconds to clean the lint trap, wipe up spilled detergent and throw away random trash. 

The administration needs to do their part by making sure that the machines work and obtaining enough machines for all of the students to feasibly do their laundry. Meanwhile, students need to do their part and understand that doing laundry at Drew is terrible for all of us, so by helping each other out, we can make things a little less terrible.