"There is a land called Passive Aggressiva & I am their queen."

Monday, April 25, 2011

I've had some awesome apartment living experiences in the past, & by "awesome" I mean "the opposite of awesome." The most notable incident that comes to mind is the time I asked my neighbors to stop having such appallingly loud sex, & there's also that damn dog down the hall, which, I should note, has begun barking much less frequently following our complaint to the landlords.

But as my friend Sarah noted,


Oh, indeed. After waiting patiently as neighbors did their laundry - even getting shut out a few times when I didn't make it to the laundry room in the small window of time before someone else beat me to it - I filled both washers with dirties. When I returned to the laundry room at the end of the cycle, I discovered that the dryers still had 10 minutes left on someone else's cycle. But another neighbor, too impatient to wait the 1/6 of an hour for me to move my clothes into an available dryer, did this:


In my humble & neighborly opinion, this is one of the crummiest things a fellow apartment-dweller could do. Whatever happened to "Love thy neighbor"? Or even "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor his washing machine, nor anything that is your neighbor's"?

In his or her haste to launder, this person clearly failed to realize that (s)he was still going to have to wait for me to dry my clothes, so I put a little Post-It note on my the washer as a reminder:


ZOOM:

Except then I chickened out & took it off. I mean, what if I accidentally bumped into this individual during the course of my laundering? I'm notoriously awful with face-to-face confrontations (for proof, please refer back to the first link in this post). So instead, I plotted a more subtle revenge: I doubled my drying time from 45 minutes to 90 minutes.

Shortly after this silent exchange, I lost my brand new laundry card, perhaps as a karmic reminder that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, or some shiz. All I know is that there are 21 minutes left on my dry cycle, & my neighbor's clothes are still marinating in their own dampness. So it seems like I win.

20 comments:

  1. Hilarious stories, although I'm sure not-so-much at the time! We had perfect, silent neighbours in our last place within an apartment block, until a week before we'd arranged to move out, when the floor below held a drug-fuelled gathering and took over our balcony (connected in a large, concrete-zig-zag kind of way). They were sooo out of place compared to the other residents! Can't handle confrontation either, so we bit our tongues and just held out that last week until we moved to the "suburbs" :-)

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  2. This is hilarious! I love reading your posts! So much fun!!
    Love that you doubled your drying time!!! haha!!!
    Happy Monday! xxx

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  3. You're awesome! *two thumbs up!* baaahahaaa.. (BUT you should have not taken of the post-it note).

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  4. Oh, I hate the shared laundry issues! Nothing peeves me off more than when people remove my clothes from either the washer or dryer because I set a timer to run up and down to get them so I don't leave them there for an hour! Everytime I've found my clothes moved I've wanted to gouge eyes out. Literally eye for an eye. One guy really pissed me off when he removed my substantial load of laundry that had *just finished washing* dumped them on the gross community table and then proceeded to put 10 things in each of the 3 washers. I seriously considered marching across the street to our apartment office and demanding a sign on "laundry etiquette"

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  5. The laundry room is my apartment is a place where souls go to die. I try not to be a huge douchebag about things like laundry, because the laundry situation at place sucks (40 units, 2 machines WTF?) and I'm one of those people who hates thinking that I'm inconveniencing people. But, usually, when it comes to laundry, people are assholes. Much like your neighbors. They deserved the note and whatever laundry karma they have coming to them.

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  6. LOL the note = win. I wish you would have left it. But then again its probably a good thing you took it off because they obvs know its YOUR clothes in the dryer and what if they would have thrown dog poop or something in the dry cycle? *gag*

    Still though, that neighbor srsly sucks.

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  7. The note is genius. Totally something I would have written myself...and then taken down in fear of a face-to-face confrontation.

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  8. Haha, I felt so powerful when posting it... until I got back to my apartment
    & was like, "OH GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!" & scurried back to the laundry room
    to take it down.

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  9. I am very happy that I live in a house with a washer and dryer. This used to happen to me all the time when I shared. So annoying!

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  10. There was a girl in my college dorm who did that to EVERYONE. It was like she hated that anyone wasn't there to take their laundry out of the washer immediately, and it was her job to prove this point. This was always happening. She was a huge bitch, so one day someone took her laundry out of the washer, stuck it in the large sink in the corner, turned on the faucet, and left. REVENGE IS SWEET.

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  11. Oh boy, I have my share of laundry experiences like this when I was in college. So glad I don't have to deal with this sh*t anymore!

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  12. I would have glued the door shut with super-precise timing glue whose bonds only dissolve when 90 minutes are up.

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  13. oh god that's so annoying. that's the only thing I gave up when I got my studio... in unit washer/ dryer, what a necessity I had no idea I needed.

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  14. I have had horrible laundry expirence to the point where i stopped using the shared laundry and drove every 2 weeks to my bf's mom's house to do laundry. But I would like to share with you a good expierance. I live in a bad area but in a friendly neighborhood. My boyfriend was drinking and doing laundry, which has bad written all over it. Well he forgot laundry in the dryer over night and my nice stay at home mom neighbor folded the laundry and brought it over to me the next day (I didn't know he had forgot laundry until she showed up at my door with it, so needless to say no more laundry doing for him). Which was Awesome :) So I cooked an extra pan of baked ziti the next night and took it over to her so she didn't have to make dinner for her family that night. Just wanted to share this to let people know that their are still some good neighbors out there.

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  15. Ohhh...I so wish you had kept that note up! But I would have done the same thing. Ha!

    I have to share the laundry room with lots of people but it's never been too bad. (5 washers, 8 dryers and about twice that at the other laundry room.) We did have our laundry basket stolen once and that really sucked.

    I have been tempted to take out people's clothes but that's only when they've been sitting there for over an hour! I mean, I get 20-30 minutes because maybe you forget (I have) but an hour?!

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  16. I totally get it when laundry has been sitting for awhile. It's not fair to
    hold up the process. This person was so impatient, though - there was
    nowhere for my laundry to go! It's not like she could move anything along.

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  17. I'm lucky to only have shared laundry while living in a dorm and during military training times. It's the worst. There's always one asshole who think that if you're 2 minutes late in getting your stuff, they've got the right to fling it about. Jerks. And that note - I LOVE it! And I would have taken it down too...I would have been worried the person would see it and then steal my laundry.

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  18. Apartment feuds are the worst, but at least you're not feuding with someone you live with. THAT is when I become the worlds biggest passhole agresshole.

    Thanks for commenting on my post on windshield diaries - I'm glad I was able to let you relive your Pappa Razzi memories!

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  19. UGHHHH this is one of my all time pet peeves! Its so disrespectful & the idea of someone else touching my laundry ie. my underwear (or vice versa) totally grosses me out. The only thing I've seen that is worse is when an old housemate of mine used to dump the clean laundry ON THE FLOOR. We had laundry in our basement so it was a gross, 100 year old, dirty basement floor. THAT'S JUST COLD!

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  20. I tend to be pretty passive aggressive myself. And probably would've left the note on the dryer because GROWL, that is SO annoying. And also because face to face confrontations don't bother me at all. I give good bitch face. "/

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