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note: this story is reposted and expanded on from something I posted elsewhere on the Internet.

Last Friday was so glamorous for me.  I mean, all of my Fridays are glamorous, but this one in particular was like out of a movie.  Unfortunately for me, it was out of a bad romantic comedy, and it was an experience of the “before she meets the man and realizes that taking risks and making an effort is WORTH it”  variety.

I work a student job at my college.  It’s a good job, pays well and the people I work for are nice and understanding.  There are days, weeks even, when I just have nothing at all to do but stare at my computer screen and wait for the time to pass.  Douglas Adams wrote that time is an illusion, and lunch doubly so, but I don’t think time is an illusion so much as it is an instrument of torture.  Friday afternoons at work, doubly so.

Eventually, assured by a co-worker that they would have nothing more for me to do that day, I bailed out early and went home to do laundry.  I had no clean clothes left. None. Frankly, the stuff I was wearing that day wasn’t really clean, but you do what you gotta do.  At least my underwear was clean.  Of course, it was my last pair of clean underwear, so again it becomes apparent why laundry was a pressing issue.  I actually got the people at the grocery store to take pity on me and give me quarters the other day, so armed with my quarters, I proceeded to do an embarrassing amount of laundry.

This left me with no clothes but a ratty old t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants.  My hair, always sort of a frizzy mess (do you see what I mean about the bad romantic comedy clichés?  I’m also clumsy!  And single!) and that day was no different.  At that point, it seemed obvious that kicking off my shoes and just walking around the complex in my grey slippers wasn’t going to make much of a difference, so I did that too.

Meanwhile, I was looking around my ridiculously messy bedroom and realizing it was really time to throw somethings out before my room was swallowed whole by pack-rattishness.  I had a bag of trash in the corner I should have thrown out ages ago, and a pile of school papers to go through.  I threw all the trash into a big plastic tub I have and took them out to our dumpster.  It was there that I proceeded to accidentally drop the entire tub in.

Now, I tell people I’m 5’3″ but that’s a lie. I’m 5’2″ tall, and the dumpster was emptied the day before. I could not reach into it and grab something that was sitting on the very bottom. I went back to my apartment to get another tub, to turn it over and stand on it. The problem it turned out, wasn’t so much my height, though, as it was my correspondingly short arms. I still couldn’t reach it.  It was at this point that I suddenly became conscious of how ridiculous I had to look.

I went back upstairs again to grab a plastic hanger.  While walking back down my stairs, I suddenly had the bright idea that if I broke the hanger, I could bend it to make it longer.  Yes, I know what plastic is. Despite this final bit of stupidity, though, I was finally triumphant.

My third attempt, standing on top of an overturned plastic box, hair looking wild, clothes looking tattered, I fished my $5 plastic tub out of our dumpster with a hanger.  I wanted to dance back up the stairs, Shirley Temple style.

After that, I went down to move clothes from one of the washers to the dryers and there was another girl in the room, putting clothes in another washer.  It was at this point that I tried to steal her laundry detergent.

Not really, obviously, but that had to have been how it looked.  It looked like my detergent (yes, I know how many people use Tide) and I was afraid that in the confusion over my dumpster diving activities, I had forgotten my detergent down there.  It was sitting next to another bottle I didn’t recognize, which I assumed was the Laundry Girl’s detergent (but turned out to be fabric softener) so I grabbed at it sort of suddenly to turn it around and see if it was my type of Tide (“Clean Breeze”).  Laundry Girl grabbed quickly at it, obviously afraid I was some kind of detergent pick-pocket or laundry grifter, and gave me an incredibly startled look.

“Oh,” I said.  “I’m sorry, I thought that was mine.”

She gave me another confused look, said nothing, and high-tailed it out of there, probably afraid I had detergent-stealing back-up hiding in one of the dryers.

If my life has to follow the tropes of a movie genre, though, I guess I’d prefer to star in a laundry caper than a clumsy-heroine romantic comedy.  Actually, a laundry caper would probably be pretty fun.  In addition to stealing other people’s detergent right in front of them, I could steal socks.  They would call me the One Sock Bandit, and my plan would involve selling mismatching socks back to their original owners  The detergent would just be for personal use.  Ultimately, my plan who lead me back to an ex-boyfriend who got out of the laundry grifter business years ago but who is the only person who can fix my washer in time to prepare the socks for their resale.

“Laundry Day,” it would be called.  And then the tagline would read “Clean clothes have never looked so good.”

Or maybe not.  I don’t know, I’m no good with taglines.

- Wednesday

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