It is 11:53 a.m. on a Saturday afternoon. Your sheets were in need of being cleaned this morning, so you head over to your laundry room in one of your BGSU dorms and throw it in the washer. That goes well, but you know what is about to come.
The dryers in the university’s dorms are arguably one of the most annoying things on campus. With data I collected myself, and spoken accounts from others, it seems to be that, on average, clothes typically dry after the second or third cycles of drying. Each cycle is around 45 minutes, and with each rehash, our fellow student residents lose another hour of their lives.
Not only do these dryers waste people’s time, they also destroy clothing on occasion. A major example of this is clothes with strings attached to them.
Just the other day, one of my favorite shirts got tangled up with the strings of some sweatpants I had while in the dryer, and now that shirt will never be worn again. That doesn’t happen at our homes though. It only occurs in a BGSU dorm’s laundry room where my wardrobe is attacked by machinery that seems to be unfit to provide a reliable service to BGSU residents.
Another example of why the dryers seem to be cursed is due to people not knowing how to use them. I am referring to the fires that have been caused recently in McDonald Hall because a student or two were unaware they should remove the lint from the dryers.
The university, in my opinion, is partly to blame for this. People who come to this university decide to do so as teenagers. They live on campus, on their own. The university does not do a great job at trying to transition these kids into adult life by educating on specific “adult” knowledge like lint traps in dryers.
The only thing that is important at the end of the day is how much money is being put into the university. No matter how much money is put into it however, they still cannot provide sufficient and reliable services to the ones who fill their paychecks, mansions and stomachs.
The counterargument to this is that students should be grateful they even get a free laundry room in their dorm at all.
But nothing is cheap on this campus. If you go into Kreischer Market, Honey Nut Cheerios are just under eight dollars. To live in Falcon Heights per semester, it is over $3,000 dollars. If we are paying that much as BGSU residents, you better believe that we deserve a laundry room. We don’t just deserve that though, we deserve functioning and reliable ones as well.
I talked to a friend of mine, Keegan Lippert, about his experience with the dryers.
“They’re super inconsistent … a few of them straight up don’t dry my clothes at all. Once, I lost three hours of my day trying to dry my clothes and it turned out that that particular dryer just didn’t work.”
Overall, it took Lippert four hours to dry his clothes. That is simply unacceptable and outright ridiculous to think such a thriving university has services that are so costly to the students who live on campus.
The university owes this to its students, just like how the students owe BGSU their tuition. I would like to see minor issues like this one resolved.
Students do not deserve their time to be wasted. We are living in a time of our lives that may seem like it is going at millions of miles per hour, and a disruption like this is like whiplash.
It’s a headache of an obstacle to go through when we have bigger things to worry about. Hopefully, we can see that change in the future.
