Skip to main content

The Laundry Room/Outhouse/Dungeon


There are many advantages to living in Ouachita Baptist University’s apartments, like the fact that my wife’s scholarship leaves us with only a $93 housing bill at the end of the month (of course, without a job that still means giving up cable [see yesterday’s blog]), we conserve gas without having to commute, and OBU provides free internet (like hotels provide “free breakfast”). OBU even provides clothes washers and dryers. That is, if you don’t mind dodging traffic in the parking lot, sprinting in the rain, or trudging through mud, all while toting your dirty underwear over your shoulder to the laundry room.

Even then, say you defy all odds and reach the laundry room as clean as you left, your clothes won’t. The laundry room/outhouse/dungeon is last place you’d want to wash clothes that you actually have to wear. There’s usually an inch of water on the floor—I haven’t decided if it’s from improper use of the washing machines or sewage backup— and all the apparatuses (two washers, two dyers, and a table) are covered in at least ten years of grime.

The most dangerous part of the laundry room is the exchange. Back home, I haphazardly tossed clothes from the washer to the dryer because it was safe (like Daunte Culpepper throwing passes to Randy Moss in triple-coverage in Minnesota, circa 2004). In the OBU laundry room/outhouse/dungeon, such inaccuracies result in instant sterilization or cremation (like Culpepper’s career without Moss).

But, hey, if they put a TV in the laundry room/outhouse/dungeon with NFL Sunday Ticket or ESPN Gameplan on it, I’d be happy to brave the perils and do laundry more than once a week.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Maybe you should learn to hand wash your clothes...it looks like you could be raped and killed in that building

Popular posts from this blog

It's Just a Little Puppy

There are a lot of things I said I  wouldn't  do in my life that  I've  done. I said that I  wouldn't  quit exercising regularly after I stopped playing sports, that I  wouldn't  be a hack writer all of my life, and that I  wouldn't  be working a part-time job at 27 with two useless college degrees. Luckily these are things I can still change. This weekend I will do something that I can’t undo. When my wife and I go home for Christmas, we will choose one of these four puppies: Having a dog  isn't  that big of a deal. Having a dog live IN my house is a big deal for me. You see, I like a neat and clean house. Being married and cleaning up after two people has required enough adjusting. A puppy living inside will challenge the very core of inner neat freak. I’m also allergic to a plethora of things. Dogs? I have no idea—I will find out shortly. With that in mind, here’s a list of things concerning my dog that ...

Value Place: An Extended Stay Horror Story

(This is a story I should have shared long before now. Make sure you have some time to spare—this one is lengthy.) Two years ago my wife was accepted into a summer internship program at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. We were still living in Arkadelphia at the time, but my wife didn't want to spend the summer making the hour drive, fighting traffic to and from Little Rock. So we decided to live in Little Rock for the summer. However, in case you don’t know, it’s difficult finding a place to live for two months. Most rentals don’t have two-month leases. If they do, the price is either ridiculous or it’s a place you do not want to live. After looking for a couple of weeks, my wife found an extended stay hotel—Value Place—advertising for like $500 a month on Craigslist. A number of things. I didn't know anything about extended stay hotels—oh how I want to be naive about extended stays again, but more on this topic shortly. All I knew was that a...

The Paragould Daily Press: Is Paid Content the Beginning of the End?

Every few days I read the Paragould Daily Press , my hometown newspaper—a newspaper I worked at as a sports writer for four years—online. I’m never looking for anything in particular. It’s just part of my routine: every morning I skim national, state, and local news for a few minutes. However, when I visited the PDP today, a few things were different. First, the website had been redesigned (and not in a good way—it takes talent to clutter what little content the PDP creates). More importantly, you now have to buy a subscription to read the paper online. This isn’t about having to pay for content (I’m sure the PDP has heard plenty of negative feedback from its online readers already); I understand what the PDP is attempting to accomplish with this move. The move to paid content was inevitable (I remember sitting in a staff meeting and discussing this very matter over five years ago when I was writing for the newspaper), as it will be and has been for much larger publications. Ne...