The Boarding-School Laundry Question I Asked at Forty-Eight

Last month my wife went to a conference for three days, and on the second morning I texted her the same question. She felt silly asking. I felt silly asking too, but I am forty-eight and the machine is in my own basement.

In our defense, the article that followed set a high bar. It began with a study claiming that 45 percent of single men in the UK wait up to four months to wash their sheets. "Now that you've had a second to dry heave," it continued, before getting into sorting by color.

Sorting by color is where I lost the middle one's gym shirt, which went in white and came out the shade of a ham.

Boarding schools have spent years trying to make the whole business easier. At Andover, in January 2025, the student paper reported that every washer and dryer on campus had been replaced, after the school decided students could do their own laundry for free. The dean of students called it "a huge decision" that students had been petitioning about "for a long time." The old machines took a laundry card. The new ones take nothing.

A student reporter's verdict, as quoted: no more refilling the card, which was a positive change, but "the dryers don't work well."

In the same issue, the school removed the paper towels from the dorm bathrooms, for waste and cost. One student argued that paper towels are "a necessity in our bathroom routines, like water."

Choate, meanwhile, offers free machines and a contract service. Even students on the do-it-yourself plan, its FAQ explains, get a laundry bag to send out their bed and bath linens each week at no cost. Somebody, somewhere, is washing the sheets of every teenager in Wallingford, Connecticut, and that somebody is not me.

My wife texted back a photograph of the drawer, with an arrow, and the word "pod." I put the pod in the drawer. The machine ran. I felt the way the dean must have felt in January, when the new dryers went in: a huge decision, a long time coming.

Then I opened the drawer to admire my work and found another pod already in it, from the last time I did laundry. It had been there since the gym shirt.