On the Campus - February 11, 1998
Past editions of On the Campus, Online
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Laundry rooms are a hub of sociability for some Princetonians BY MANDY TERC '99 | |
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Early in this school year, I met a tall, friendly woman, and we struck up a conversation about traveling abroad. I'd spent a summer in France; she'd just returned from a semester in Madrid. We shared stories for almost an hour about struggling to speak a different language and the excitement of living alone in a foreign city. Then we went our separate ways. All this took place in the laundry room located in the basement of Laughlin Hall, where we were both washing, drying, and folding. I've never seen her again, and I don't even know her name. Unlike most people -- who groan about doing the laundry and wait until they have one shirt left to visit the communal washers and dryers -- I enjoy my weekly ritual. There I can meet and talk to new people, and I'm as much of an unknown as they are. It's up to them to guess my eating club, my major, and my activities, using only the color of my T-shirts and the fabric of my socks as clues. The anonymity is reciprocal. I have 30-minute friendships with people about whom I know almost nothing and never will.
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Doing laundry also presents the occasional opportunity to become an invisible good Samaritan. Once I removed someone's dry clothes from a dryer because there were no other machines available. I felt guilty about handling their laundry, so I tried to make up for it by folding their stuff before they came to collect it. Bored, I laid their clothes into neat little piles, one for gym clothes, another for school shirts. Their owner never appeared during the time that I was finishing my own laundry. The next day, my roommate told me she'd seen a note on a table in the laundry room while she was doing her wash. Someone had folded someone else's clothes, she told me, and their owner had left a thank-you note. Resisting the temptation to reveal myself as the folder, I just smiled. Later, I slipped down to collect the note:
"Dear Whomever folded my clothes, (baggy Gap Jeans) (green-purple towel) (tiger-striped silk boxers . . . er . . . not) Thanks! What a pleasant surprise. -J"
The letter perfectly maintained the unwritten rules of the laundry room. I still don't know that person's identity, but he had kept up a connection that exists only among those washers and dryers.
HANGING OUT THE DIRTY LAUNDRY Sometimes the friendships formed do survive more than one or two sessions with the laundry machines. During her freshman year, Rachel Person '99 did her wash every Thursday afternoon. Another student routinely did his at the same time. At first, they just smiled and nodded. But a few weeks into the semester, Rachel's companion noticed that her name was embroidered on her laundry bag. He began calling her by name, and soon, they were using their laundry time together to talk to each other. Each week, she looked forward to catching up on her laundry buddy's week. "We actually formed a nice friendship just by chatting together while we did our laundry," Person said. "It would have been a better story if we had ended up falling in love, but all that happened was that we became friends." In the busy world of Princeton exams and commitments, students sometimes use the laundry room as a coffee shop of sorts. Though it may not have the ambiance of the hip java joints that have sprung up in Princeton lately (see On the Campus, DATETK) students can clean their clothes and catch up with old friends at the same time. I know one student who routinely plans "laundry dates" with a close friend. "It's so hard for us to get together because we're both so busy," she explains. "If we do laundry together, we can get something done, but we can talk at the same time." Sometimes the dirty jeans and wet sheets act like a window into people's personalities, but then again, sometimes they don't. I went to collect a load of towels the other night and saw a large, athletic boy sifting through the piles of neglected laundry. He looked like a football player, and I immediately figured him for the sloppy, messy type -- he probably didn't even fold his laundry, just grabbed it and ran. But I was wrong. As I looked closer, I saw him folding his shirts into the neatest, wrinkle-free squares I had ever seen. The cross between Martha Stewart and a linebacker made me chuckle. Only in the laundry room.
Mandy Terc does her laundry on Fridays.
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Also at the bottom of the computer food chain? E-mail cwtooke@princeton.edu by Wes Tooke '98
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At the dawn of the Information Age, I slept in until
noon. While my fellow classmates were spending
their adolescence learning to program and
interface, I was sticking my nose in some dusty, old book. By
the time I began my Princeton career, I found myself hopelessly
behind the curve. It certainly didn't help that the computer I brought to school was a Macintosh LC -- Apple's response to Betamax. Still, the pile of wires was perfectly good to me until the day I decided I needed to be networked. My little computer spoke to the other computers for about 15 minutes, felt grossly inadequate, and promptly committed suicide. For the next three years I lived in the campus computer clusters, which double as laboratories for the social-psychology program. |
 Illustration by Peter Bono |
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Misery loves company, and
the clusters are like safe houses for the wretched. At all
hours of the night, lost souls wander in and out looking for
pages that will never print and programs that will never
boot. Furthermore, the cluster computers are possessed. No
joke. Not only do they have more viruses then a chicken
from Hong Kong, they also have an extremely bad attitude.
Case in point. Last year during exam time (when finding a free computer on campus is more difficult then finding an empty taproom during houseparties), I was working in the Fine Hall cluster. I was typing my junior paper on what seemed to be a perfectly nice, understanding Mac when it suddenly decided to throw a hissy fit because it didn't have a floating-point coprocessor. What, you ask, would a complete computer illiterate like me -- who can't even figure out how to spell-check -- be doing that would require a floating-point coprocessor? I still have no idea. Anyway, I got a cheery little message informing me that my erratum had caused a fatal system error, and wouldn't I have a nice day. Then a little bell beeped, and I was "Welcomed to Macintosh" by a happy little screen icon with a big smile, which I promptly punched in the teeth causing untold damage to the computer screen, my ego and my fist. After I had a good cry, I gave the computer a very firm talking to, and it finally mentioned I might want to look in the Trash, where it had mysteriously saved my work for no particular reason. Given the prevalence of this kind of fiasco, sometimes I think students would be better off if we relied less on computers. Many professors, for example, argue that computers are partially responsible for the declining quality of writing on campus. Grumpiness aside, they may have a point. My generation's idea of a second draft is the spell check. Furthermore, working on a computer infinitely multiplies the quantity and depth of a person's procrastinating tools. Even as I write this column, my computer is flashing updated sports scores in the background. The quality of my logic in papers is almost always inversely correlated with the quality of the Celtics game that evening. Yet if you read the latest reports in the media, computers and the Internet are supposed to be revolutionizing education by increasing the amount of information available to today's students. Let me nip that in the bud. There is nothing less useful for research than the Internet as it exists today. Certainly, browsing on the Internet is fantastic. If you're a sports fan, you can find the top 450 junior-high basketball players ranked by personal hygiene. However, a great pestilence shall descend on the person who tries to use the Internet to actually do research. If you try to find something on the federal budget, the computer will spit out 22,143 sites, including a link to 14-year-old Sven of Sweden's page dedicated to the Jackson Five. Further complicating matters, Sven's site is infinitely more interesting than the Office of Management and Budget's. This year I moved up the food chain and finally bought my own computer. I quickly realized one essential truth: the people who work the help desk at Computer and Information Technology perform a role on campus similar to the man-god in tribal societies. Once a week, some vital piece of my computer stops functioning for reasons beyond my mortal powers of comprehension. At this point, I call the very patient and underpaid help-desk staff, who ought to be managing Microsoft rather then calming a hopelessly flustered A.B. student. Invariably, the computer is not working because of something I did. After making a sacrifice to the man-gods (involving a small gift of RAM), all is forgiven and my computer begins to whir once again. Still, sitting here during exam time, I think I could find it in my heart to forgive computers if it weren't for their one fatal flaw. They won't write my papers for me. |
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