I Get My Laundry Done for Free*

^* By which I mean a portion of the cost of doing my laundry is subsidized by idiots.

Let me explain. A little over a year ago, the leasing office in my building renovated the two laundry rooms we have here. They took out the old single-coin-slot-style washers and dryers for an "multi-coin" tray-style design. This design is presumably more reliable...and more expensive. If everything goes according to plan, you put a quarter in each of the five slots on the tray and push it in. The mechanism will detect the five quarters, drop them into the coin store, and the machine will begin washing or drying your clothes.

That's if everything goes according to plan. It appears that some idiot has decided to get rid of his extra Canadian currency by placing a single moosehead quarter in the tray and then slamming the tray in as hard as he possibly can. He has to have developed a method by which this actually gets him a 25-cent discount sometimes, because it is a regular occurrence for me to see trays jammed by a Canadian quarter in the rightmost slot. If this were just plain ignorance, then a) the Canadian quarter would have a uniform distribution in its position in the tray and b) the tray never jams under the application of normal force, even with Canadian currency.

If something goes awry, the tray will refuse to slide in completely and effectively "reject" your money. I've tried it both with a Canadian quarter and with an incorrect number of U.S. quarters, and the mechanisms behind the tray are simply too "smart" to take your offerings. One would have to put an abusive amount of force on the device in order to force it to take a Canadian quarter. I cannot even guess at the success rate of this maneuver, but I know for a fact that I routinely find about one jam every time I do laundry. (Until today, I haven't really been looking.) I can unjam these trays with nothing more than a dull penknife and some patience. Unjamming a tray can take anywhere from a few minutes to, literally, just a couple of seconds. Invariably, the cause of the jam is four perfectly valid U.S. quarters and one moosehead in the rightmost slot.

Today alone I unjammed three dryers, for a gross gain of $3.00 U.S. (and 75 cents Canadian). Concurrently to this I washed two loads of laundry and combined them in one dryer. Cost: 3 * ($1.25) = $3.75. So doing my laundry today only cost me 75 cents, which means 2 free washings and a partially subsidized drying.

I don't know who's jamming the machines, but considering that every time it succeeds it saves him 25 cents and every time it fails it costs him a dollar, he's helping me more than he's helping himself. (If anybody knows what I can do with the Canadian quarters, please write.)