I hate doing laundry. As a matter of fact, I don't know one single person who gets fired up and excited to spend precious time washing and drying clothes...y'all are out there though, aren't you? My aversion to doing laundry can be traced back to years of doing other peoples' laundry when my mom owned a coin operated laundry facility in Atlanta. You would not believe how much you can learn about a person just by washing, drying, and folding their clothes. That is what the service is called by the way, wash, dry, and fold; and it's hard work, people. It's not fluff and fold as some people falsely advertise. Fluff implies some waif in a sexy maid's uniform with five inch stilettos gently caressing your unmentionables. Maybe that's why the majority of customers were men. Imagine their dismay when the woman doing the washing was a five foot, plump, middle aged, cherub with man hands.
So, how much do you charge someone to wash their clothes for them? Not enough as far as I'm concerned, but in fact you charge by the pound. Are we washing clothes or buying fruit? Seriously, there was a giant scale that was constantly being broken by some clueless guy whose entire wardrobe was wrapped up in his full sized sheet set. He would wobble in, hidden by a mound of green, brown and navy plaid, and drop the dead weight onto the scale before you could warn him about the weight limit. The scale would bottom out, which was never a good thing especially when there was nothing but a sheet holding the bundle together. In order to calculate the weight of the mass, you were then resigned to unwrapping the package and removing weight until the scale returned to its normal function. I preferred the, guess how much it weighs, method because removing weight required taking some stranger's nasty, grungy, smelly, don't know where it's been, personal things off the top of the pile until the scale worked again. It was painful to do, and even more painful to watch. The person's expression turned to horror as you instructed him to unwrap his goodies so that you could plunder through them. All I can say is thank god for latex gloves. Over the years we found roaches, crabs, urine (cat and/or human), vomit, animal hair (the proportions of which makes you wonder...how do people live like this?), adult toys, used condoms, money, cigarettes and food. I think some people combined their laundry and garbage duties and left it up to us to determine which was which. The joke was on them though because it was our policy to return anything found in someone's clothes...anything!
These days my reason for hating laundry stems mostly from my lack of proper laundry space. I live in a very nice house, but my laundry room is almost an afterthought. I have issues with it. It's like the size of a small walk in closet right next to my refrigerator. The washer and dryer just barely fit side by side. There is very little space for hanging clothes, which I tend to do a lot of because I don't dry most of my clothes all the way. My mom called it frying clothes when I was young, so I'm left with a mental picture of my clothes literally frying—thanks mom. I also don't buy anything that needs to be dry cleaned because my mom owned a dry cleaning store too. That's a whole different story. You know it's laundry day at my house when, invariably, every square inch of my "laundry room" and kitchen has clothes dangling from the door jambs. It looks like a giant laundry mobile! I guess it could be worse. I could have to pack up my dirty clothes in a king sized sheet and haul it to the nearest soap 'n' suds. Either way, laundry is a chore we all cannot escape, so I guess I'll always be doing wash-dry-fold. At least now it's just my family's urine, vomit and pet hair, and I can handle that.
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