LIVING WITH LAUNDRY GUILT

We at Dartboard are embarrassed. We're not sure we can ever eat lunch in our House dining hall again. We've just finished our biweekly laundry ordeal, and we're suffering from laundry guilt.

Those readers whose moms still do their laundry may not be familiar with this concept. Laundry guilt is the psychological state resulting from taking somebody else's wet clothing out of a washing machine and leaving it in a bedraggled pile on top of the next washer so you can put your own clothes in. Alternatively, laundry guilt can ensue after removing dry clothes from a dryer and placing them either (a) in a plastic garbage bag or (b) on top of a washer.

Laundry guilt occurs on the edge of a moral gray area. What are the ethical constraints governing laundry removal? Some students refuse, on moral grounds, to remove any laundry at all from washers or dryers; they sleep well at night, but don't do laundry very often.

Other students will take laundry out of a dryer and put it in a plastic bag, but only if the owner is more than a few minutes late in returning to the laundry room. And some have no compunctions at all; they will happily allow freshly-washed whites to languish on dirty washer tops for hours.

We at Dartboard are uncertain where to draw the line. But we do know how uncomfortable it is when the owner of the wet pile of clothes you're removing from the washing machine suddenly comes up behind you. "Oh, are those my clothes?" he says, halfway between annoyed and embarrassed. "Sorry," we say, slinking away. We'll avoid that guy for weeks. Next time, we'll try doing laundry in the middle of the night on a weekday.