A Story of Three Laundry Rooms
Most apartment buildings in Sweden have laundry rooms. For some reason, I find myself thinking about them quite often. And I’ve written about them here a couple of times. This is a story about three laundry rooms from my past.
The first one was impeccable. Unlike most laundry rooms, this one was really well-kept. It seemed that most people who used it swept the floor afterwards, wiped off the washing machines, which were all brand new, cleaned the filter in the drier – everything the angry signs seen in every laundry room tell you to do.
Most but not all people did this, and after a while, there was an angry note from one of the tenants, with the expected expression of outrage. I hadn’t noticed so reading about this was a total surprise. To me, enough users of the laundry room cleaned after themselves, such that I often felt it was pointless to sweep the floor, as I hadn’t made it visibly dirtier. So if someone skipped cleaning up once in a while, it wouldn’t make any difference, unless you sherlock-holmed the room to see if the one before you had obeyed the rules. ‘The floor might be clean, but it isn’t wet! Hmm…’
This reasoning came from the laundry room in the building where we lived prior to this one. It was the worst one I’ve seen. After having lived there for a couple of years, my estimate was that at most two other tenants beside me cleaned up after themselves. I didn’t always clean up; as virtually no-one did, I had no qualms about skipping it every once in a while when I didn’t feel like it.
At regular intervals, there were angry notes from other tenants about people not cleaning up, and once in a while there was a note from the landlord, demanding with great authority that everyone better start.
While living there, I made lots of hypotheses about this particular laundry room. Could I alone, by always doing a insanely thorough cleaning up somehow transform the other tenants into at least doing the prescribed sweeping of the floor, wiping off of the machines, and emptying of the drier filter? My hypothesis was that the reason people didn’t clean up was that they saw no point of doing this: nobody else does, so why should I? I worked very hard for months on this project, but it didn’t work. It was about this time I made my estimate of how many tenants cleaned up after themselves. On a few occasions, I could tell that somebody had cleaned up sometime since my last laundry room session.
(A funny thing happened one time when I missed my booked slot in the laundry room schedule. There was a sign urging everybody to take care of the laundry room. It was one of these plastic signs with engraved letters, and it was signed ‘The landlord!’ – with an authoritative exclamation point. Someone had hung this big red angry sign on my lock on the booking board. I was offended at first, but then found it funny given my current project to save the laundry room.)
The laundry room of the next place we moved to superseded – by far! – the one of the former as the worst one I’ve seen. After my first laundry session I was determined to get a washing machine and somehow squeeze it into the bathroom of our apartment. The machines seemed to date from the 1970s and were incredibly unclean, the place smelled of molds. But as the configuration of our bathroom didn’t allow for any of the washing machines we considered to be squeezed in, we had no choice but to continue using the laundry room. And pretty quickly I got used to it – and began to further my laundry room theories.
A very interesting thing about this laundry room was that here, people didn’t seem angry at each other for not cleaning up. Everyone seemed to concede that the place was beyond hope, that no matter how thorough a clean they did, it would make no difference. I never saw an angry note here. The only note I can recall seeing was about a lost garment.
This laundry room made it apparent that the condition of our former one was neither good nor bad. It was bad enough for people not to care for it, and good enough for people to feel bad and whine about nobody caring for it.
The first laundry room, the impeccable one, worked pretty well, but the social conditions were very fragile. Part of me would want to conduct an experiment there where I would consistently ignore to clean up, to see if I could bring the laundry room down, and get people to not care for it anymore.
The fact is that the happiest laundry room is the one in the worst condition. This is an unfragile happiness. The impeccable laundry room had a tangible air of suspicion; you didn’t dare to leave it non-impeccable.
I have a feeling that any social theory could be proven by studying laundry rooms.