serinde

I've never had to use a laundromat before, believe it or not. I've been putting this confrontation off, Lord knows why, it's not actually that different from having coin-op-in-basement, and yet here was the avoidance behavior; but I need clean pants if I want to continue fighting evil this week, so.

This being the Upper East Side, there is a plethora of Chinese dry-cleaning/wash-fold-pay-by-the-pound establishments, but only one DIY location (as far as I can tell) in close range; it's one block down, one over. HOLY HELL, $2 FOR THE HALF SIZED WASHERS and $4 for the ones you can fit your comforter in. If it's not a big comforter. Oh dear oh dear. The dryers are 8 minutes for a quarter, as

elibalin predicted, which might be okay depending on how sucky or un-sucky the dryers actually are; a question I will be able to report on in, oh, 20 minutes or so. Certainly the washers leave one's clothes more sodden than is quite right, which does not augur well.

It is possible (though I'm dubious) that it might not work out much more costly to take it all to the Here's My Clothes, Make Them Nice businesses, but the thought makes me twitch an awful lot.

spride's recounted experience of "You drop off your clothes in a bag, they weigh them, they give you a form where you tick off temperature and whether you want bleach and whether you use fabric softener, and they toss it out and you get it all back nicely folded and two sizes smaller in a couple days" exactly meshes with my rampant fear-laden imagination, and I don't want people messing with my stuff. It could be argued that abandoning my unmentionables for forty minutes could also lead to unwanted results, but then they'd just be missing, not messed up.

I do not pretend this is a rational reaction, but it's what I've got to work with.