This story begins back in my college days, many years ago. It was a cool autumn day of my freshman year and I was enjoying one of my weekends hanging out and relaxing in my dorm room. My buddy and roommate Mike was planning on doing his wash, which was greatly needed and well over due. Our dormitory didn’t have a washer and dryer, so we always had to use the ones in the many nearby dormitories, that were within a short walking distance. With his bag of dirty clothes over his shoulder, Mike headed out while I just hung out and grooved to some tunes.

While hanging out in front of the window, enjoying the nice autumn breeze, I see a steady stream of girls filing out of the nearby dorm. (It was the all-girl dorm, which we enjoyed visiting when we weren’t studying.) It seems that the fire alarm went off and the girls were being evacuated in a orderly manner. You could see some smoke coming out of one of the windows. It wasn’t that much, but it was enough to set off the alarm. With all the girls running around, it really got the guys in my dorm to stand up and take notice.

Moments later Mike came bolting in the room with his hands full of wet laundry. It seems that he was in the all-girls dorm when the fire alarm went off. He looked like he was caught by surprise and that he might have lost a sock or two while running back. I asked him what happened and was quite surprised with his response. He said he was doing his wash and wanted to save some money, so he loaded all his wet clothes into one dryer. That was before the alarm went off.

Unbeknownst to Mike, the dryer wasn’t a large capacity dryer, and it promptly screeched to a halt while the motor burned out. The dryer was well used, a little old, and had collected a good amount of lint, which helped to start a small fire and created plenty of smoke that set off the alarm. Of course Mike grabbed what clothes he could and ran back to the room.

Moments later the dryer fire was stopped and the girls returned to their rooms. Mike and I looked at his pile of wet clothes and tried to figure out what to do. We couldn’t just leave the wet clothes. Intimidated to leave the room to use another dryer and not wanting to draw any attention to himself, in case anyone noticed his previous blazing laundry bolt from the other dorm, he came up with a plan.

The plan was to hang dry the clothes. He borrowed some rope from a guy down the hall who requested it not be to cut from it’s original length of a few hundred feet. Though our room was a small 10″x10″, he proceeded to set up a labyrinth of rope criss-crossing from one wall to another. Rope was strewn from the bunk bed rung to the light fixture, sink to closet knob, bike to window, and so on. By the time he was done, the room looked like it had a nice new spiderweb, which took up all of the available space. I should have left prior to this, because by the time he had finished hanging his clothes up, there was no way to leave.

I was trapped in a room of wet clothes strung up everywhere. That day I really didn’t go out at all, but I did get plenty of time to finish my assignments amidst the damp clothes smell. Mike is a great guy and always kept me laughing with his wacky antics and that day was no different.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 15th, 2005 and is filed under Humor, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.