Essays and Assays

Laundry Warriors by Barbara North Copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved Barbara North also an award-winning stand-up comic and writer featured on Canadian national television and radio. If you’ve got a satellite dish, you can always catch her crazy characters every day on Teletoon, the cartoon network where Barbara is Canada’s female character announcer. (A weird fact: Babs has a Guinness World Record for appearing in the longest running stand-up comedy show in history.) Barbara is also a freelance writer who has published in newspapers, magazines and websites across Canada and the U.S. She is also a screenwriter. Her animated children’s program the Magic Dog Radio Call-in Show is currently in development for television. Keep tabs on Babs at her website: BarbNorth.com

What a fool I was to believe I had the grit to mess with Saturday laundry warriors.  

Being of the slob persuasion I rarely visit my apartment building laundry room.  Little did I know that Saturday’s laundry special ops forces don’t fool around.  

You put in a load and - dang! - if you don’t show up EXACTLY 30 minutes later your undies are POW’s — panties of war.  Someone else’s dirty socks take their place.  Your things are lined up on the front lines of the countertop.  (Laundry wars are also very much like show biz: you can be hung out to dry in minutes.  Instead of 15 minutes of fame you’ve got 30 minutes of spin.)

To laundry warriors there’s not a second to spare between loads.  And oops - I made the rookie mistake of doing two loads!  Not only did I have to deal with the washer nazis, but also the dryer commandos.  My butt was in a drip-dry sling if I wasn’t in that laundry room by the end of the spin cycle.  Ask not for whom the buzzer tolls, it buzzes for thee.  

There’s obviously strategy here.  Strategy I failed to employ.  My load was already sitting on top of a machine when I went down to execute the big move: The Transfer From Wash to Dry.  Apparently I hadn’t been gun-trigger quick enough.    

Maybe this is laundry room justice.  Maybe I’m just getting returns on bad laundry karma.  You see, earlier I’d taken someone else’s laundry out of the dryer and put it on top of a machine.  Now wait, wait!  Before you judge me, understand that I’d given them a whole extra half hour, even making a few trips to see if they’d collect their dead first.  My undies were afforded no such stay of execution.  

Then it happens: a direct confrontation!  The Saturday laundry warriors are vicious.  They come armed with hampers and cling-free sheets.  They wear the uniform of the laundry militant — sweat pants and ripped up t-shirts that say, "Virginia is for lovers."  They wave their coins menacingly, wanting to know when I’ll be done.  

I huddle toward my machine: "I’m still using it," I say meekly.  Quickly I deploy quarters, plugging more into the dryer.  One cycle wasn’t enough for my over-sized load.  The laundry warrior stabs me with her stare.  I busy myself with emptying the lint tray.   I hope this will be taken as a sign of good will.  Like a dog revealing its belly to show subservience: Ya see, I’m a good neighbor - I clean dryer lint!  

I wave my white dryer lint like a flag.

The hardened domestic freedom fighter grunts.  She leaves her post, disgusted at my weakness.  In this world of weekend laundry warriors I’m obviously the "weakened warrior."

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