Laundry Day

Sometimes laundry day doesn’t go quite as planned. This happened to Jennica and I yesterday. The first thing Jennica and I did after arriving at our hostel in Berlin was grab out all of our dirty laundry and head down to the second floor in search of the washing machine and dryer. We came out of the staircase and saw a man standing in the hallway outside a room in only his underwear, with a pile of what we thought was just clothes at first glance on the floor next to him. We thought okay, this seems a little strange, but maybe he showered in the communal bathroom in the hallway and he is just struggling to get his key to work to get back into his room. A few of us had problems with our keys not wanting to work on the first, or fifth, try, so we didn’t think much of it and we continued down the hallway. As we walked down the hallway I tried to avoid eye contact because I noticed him watching us as we walked by.  We came to the door that leads to what we thought would be just a laundry room, but found when we opened the door that it was the communal bathroom, just with a washer and dryer also stuffed in there. There was something that looked like an article of clothing on a bench in there, so we decided to look and see if there was another washer and dryer on this floor because we thought that the clothes in the bathroom belonged to the man in only his underwear, and something about him was starting to seem a bit off.  We turned around the next corner and could still hear the man trying to get the key to work, the card reading making a noise each time he tried. We could hear him mumbling and starting to seem annoyed that the key wasn’t working. We found a map of the floor and it didn’t show any other laundry facilities on the floor we were on, so we decided to go chance it with the one we already looked in if the stuff was no longer in it. We turned the corner and started walking back down the hallway where the bathroom and the man were, and could now hear the man rambling on to himself much faster and louder than before. We got to outside the bathroom door and realized that he was no longer in the hallway in front of us, but that he was now in the bathroom right in front of us.  At this point we became spooked and backed away from the door slowly and quietly, then began running down the hallway towards the stairwell we came up. We got to the pile of stuff in the hallway and I happened to glance down at his belongings, and saw several needles and syringes lying on the floor in his stuff. I looked at Jennica and said “needles”, and we began running much faster, down the stairway with our laundry in our arms. We got to the bottom of the stairs and found ourselves on a landing with a door that looked locked on one side of us, and a door that was made up of grates on the other side of us. I instantly thought oh great, now we’ve gotta go back up and there’s no way I’m doing that! Jennica was smart enough to try opening the grate door, and relieved to find it unlocked we went running through it.  We came out into the hostel courtyard and quickly made our way to the front desk. The man and lady at the front desk took one look at us and could tell that something was wrong. We frantically explained to them what we just experienced and the man went running out, telling the lady to be ready to call 112. Jennica and I stood at the front desk, still clutching our laundry, a bit unsure of what to do now. While we waited the front desk man came back and said that they had some people up there making sure that the guy wouldn’t go anywhere, and that the police were on their way. The lady at the front desk told us that there are another washer and dryer on the first floor, but that it may or may not work. It had been broken but the repairman came earlier that day and had possibly fixed it. She said if it ate our money and didn’t work then to come back down and they would reimburse us. We figured that the chances of something going wrong at both laundry places were slim, so we cautiously made our way to the first floor laundry room.  We opened the door and were relieved to find that this laundry room was just that, a laundry room containing only a washer and dryer. We opened the washer and Jennica began loading it while I held the door open, a bit creeped out to just let it close and not be aware of what was happening outside the room. We got everything in the washer, put our money in, and nothing happened. We tried hitting every button and finally gave up, figured out how to open it, took our laundry all back out, and once again walked back down to the front desk. A whole little congregation of some of our classmates and Dr. Powell were standing in the lobby, and upon our arrival Dr. Powell told us that the police said they wanted to talk to us and that we did the right thing by telling the front desk what we saw. I thought to myself, “well what else were we supposed to do?”, and we made our way back up to the front desk. We got our money back that the second washer ate, and were told that the police decided they didn’t want to talk to us. They told us that the second floor laundry room would be open in a few hours or tomorrow, once the situation was over and they could clean it up, but we decided that we were done trying to do laundry for the day. We made our way back up to our room feeling defeated, and decided to try to do laundry again the next day.