Laundry Day (A Very Exciting Day)

Today I have to do my laundry… exciting stuff, right? Well, it’s not anymore now that I have a washer and dryer in my apartment. There was a time; however, that laundry was a very exciting day. That was back when I shared a laundry room with everyone else in my apartment building. Now, it is common knowledge that when doing laundry in public laundry mats that you will lose some article of clothing. Be it a sock, a shirt, etc. it is almost certain that something will be missing when the chore is complete. But what if you had the opposite happen to you? What if you found a little something special for you in every load, like a Cracker Jack box? ...

This laundry lottery effect began about a year ago. I had just gotten home from a long day at school, done my laundry, and I began to put my clean clothes away. I started pairing up socks and noticed that I had an extra one. My first thought was that I had lost one and I started to look around frantically for it. I finally realized that it wasn’t mine. I was confused. You never find anything extra in your laundry. What was I to do with the sock? It was a good sock. I could keep it in case I lost one or found another. But, then again, keeping an item of clothing that has been soaked in the foot sweat of another guy almost made me puke in my mouth. So, I returned it to the laundry room in hopes that the owner would find it and cherish it more this time around. Okay, so that’s the boring part, the best was yet to come.

I didn’t think much about the incident the next week while I retrieved my laundry from the dryer. When I found the next extra sock, I was just as amazed and once again found myself debating if I should keep it and beating myself up for having discarded last week’s sock surprise because I could have made a pair. Ultimately, my better sense made me return it as I had the previous week.

The next week brought a new gift, a foreign t-shirt! That’s when I thought things were getting a little out of hand. I mean, I thought I looked in the machines before I put stuff in them. A sock is an easy miss, but a shirt?! How’d I miss that? The coming week I’d be ready! But nothing could have prepared me for the coming weeks!

I was super cautious when investigating the machines. I wasn’t going to get any surprises that day. When finished, I dumped the last load of laundry on my bed to fold my clothes and put everything away. When the pile was almost gone, I noticed something strange… something shiny… something silky, something lacey….. something that resembled girl’s panties!!! But, not resembling, they were girl’s panties! I had to get rid of them! But, I didn’t want to pick them up! They were a girl’s undergarment and had been to places a more taboo than a boy’s sock! What if a roommate saw me with them? What if someone saw me returning them??? Anyway, I returned them and became more paranoid than ever.

The paranoia didn’t help though as, in the next two of three weeks, the incident repeated itself. It became a joke! I soon became a lot more comfortable with the fact that I would find women’s underwear in my laundry, of all kinds, in fact. I even debated if I should start a collection. It was a quick debate in the negative favor. But ever since then, laundry day became like a holiday amongst my friends. Everyone knew I would find something special each week. We soon began to guess. Girls would joke and say they would leave something for me. Those were the days… the most exciting laundry days of my life.