(The Coinmach empire began with a single row of front-lading machines in Long Island in 1947. Now it is coming after me. Photo Coinmach.)

I am starting to panic. The issues cascading over us- the nonsensical tax bills wending their ways to nowhere in the Senate and House, the controversy over whether there is an Anglo-American traditional link between the late Colonists and the Mother Country, the tortured nuances between the candidates, discussions of firearms control, Russians with nuclear weapons going back on patrol….I sense a common thread in all this.

We are committed- passionately committed- to things that won’t work.

You don’t have to stay with me. That really is enough of an observation to get going this morning, going with the flow.

In fact, it was basically ‘the flow’ that got my agitation cycle going. I was going through yesterday’s mail at the breakfast table when I discovered the most recent emerging threat to my tiny portion of Western Civilization. The threat is being delivered not by Mr. Putin’s submarine missile force, but by the Big Pink Condo Board. There have been flyers in the elevators for several weeks, announcing that the washers and dryers in the common laundry rooms are being replaced.

The ones we have now are standard vanilla Speed Queens, with slots for tokens available for purchase from Rhonda at the concierge desk in the lobby. The tokens come in little manila enveloped, $30 apiece. I normally get two, since it is a pain to have to start a load, run short of a token and have to take a trip with a check to see Rhonda, not that it isn’t fun to go down and flirt a little.

Of late, that has been most of my human contact. With the looming replacement of the laundry equipment comes real change, and it is change I am not sure I can believe in.

The mail brought matters to a head. A crisp white envelope held several brochures outlining the superior technology that is going to make our lives better.

As an aside, if you have a single family home, or a condo constructed after the Age of Flying Lizards, you are probably are responsible for your own laundry infrastructure. I remember the days when I could walk through the mud-room, throw some soiled clothes in my washer, and walk away. There was never a queue to join, or a trip down the hall to see if the machines are in use. Some of my neighbors apparently have laundry as a hobby, and the only way to beat them to it is start the search right at the instant the Condo Board says we can run the machines, 0700-2200.

That is not going to change. But everything else is. The building has a total of sixteen laundry rooms, each one with two washers and dryers. The evolution of American life is contained in our little snap-shot. Frances Freer, the visionary lady who built the Buckingham Garden Apartments, started with the original concept of clean clothes. In Buckingham, the washing machines were in the basement of the low two-story brick buildings. They were dark, and hard to keep clean and the women hated them.

When Frances got around to erecting Big Pink as an apartment building in the early 1960s, the concept of shared laundry facilities was still the conventional wisdom. Big Pink’s approach was evolutionary: the laundry rooms would be small, and one each would be located on the east and west wings of each floor.

The women still hated it, since once the door closed behind them they were alone in the little rooms, claustrophobic and unable to see who might be outside. As the concept of “women’s work” slid into irrelevance, the next building Frances constructed (The Hyde Park, the other tower that frames the old Buckingham empire) featured a place for washers and dryers in the units themselves.

Just as things were meant to be in an expanding and more permissive America.

Anyway, it is too hard to retrofit our building to another social scheme, and at least our machines are not in some remote basement location where you cannot, a priori, determine if everyone else has the same virtuous idea simultaneously.

Fine. But I have to say that the minor irritation of the tokens and scheduling around my neighbors did not blip my list of problems. Now it does. The literature that came with the “smart card” that runs the new machines was downright alarming. We are joining 80,000 other happy Coinmach consumers.

Coinmach is an acknowledged leader in the common area laundry industry, a feature of the economy of which I had been blissfully unaware until this morning. “Coinmach delivers industry-leading laundry solutions to multifamily owners, managers and residents nationwide,” said the brochure.

And they are going to deliver a couple other things. The new machines will be front-end loaders, and they will use dramatically less water. That is a good thing, right? I support smart and efficient use of water, though since none of our individual units is specifically metered, there is no particular direct incentive to moderate our showering or dishwashing habits.

We are going to get a Coinmach custom solution to our laundry needs. The more I read about the new machines, the more alarmed I got. This is serious high-tech stuff. Energy Star, of course. But front loading machines? I don’t trust them. “Do not slam the doors,” read the literature ominously. Do not use your regular detergent, since the lower water requirement means that over-suds situations could overwhelm the machine, then the room, and ultimately spread like The Blob down the corridors and surge in bubbly white fury into the units, and flow ultimately down into the units below and overwhelm the cars in the parking lot.

The brochure admonished me to replace my Tide with a cleaning liquid certified “H-E,” whatever that might mean. I my world that has always meant “high explosives,” which caused a more than a bit of unease.

I put down the brochure. Is this like the miracle light bulb that lasts five times longer than the old incandescent? The ones that we fond out later contains a significant enough level of mercury to make the breaking of one a toxic HAZMAT event in the comfort and safety of your own home?

Is it like the low-flow toilets that have to be flushed at least twice, and which has spawned a black market in illegal Canadian commodes, smuggled in like boot-leg liquor from our neighbor to the North? The dishwashers that no longer clean the dishes, since the more environmentally friendly detergent they require does actually clean the dishes?

(It is actually 44 miles. Oh well.)

Could it be like the Chevy Volt or the Nissan Leaf automobiles that boasted cruising ranges “up to a hundred miles” on the battery, but which in practice are averaging 44 miles?  The best the battery cars can do is give me the same range fully charged as when the Bluesmobile flashes the ‘low fuel panic’ light. It is technology that simply doesn’t work.

I love technology, but am skeptical about this one, based on the miracle We have a lot of older people in the building, and increasingly, I find myself one of them. The technical innovations- the new detergent, the smart cards, the ability of the machines to communicate with a central processing facility.

“Laundry facilities should be dependable profit centers designed to satisfy the needs of your residents,” says Coinmach. No tokens, smart cards. Rhonda is taken out of the equation completely, but the cards cannot be replenished by check, and you cannot flirt with them. Cash only, to be fed into those slots that never quite seem to work on a well-handled and dog-eared five-spot.

Apparently the Condo Board bought the argument from the slick salesman who appeared at the meeting: “Only Coinmach can offer the solution to meet your communal laundry needs. Very simply, Coinmach creates more revenue and greater resident satisfaction through exceptional service, leading edge technology and technologically advanced equipment and communications tools, delivering the ultimate convenience.”

The ultimate convenience, I suspect, would be a washing machine that gets clothes clean the first time. Just like the ones we have now.

I will have to rely on the Board’s judgment, since we were not asked to vote. It is Change we are going to have to believe in.

I hope I can return the $30 envelope in tokens to Rhonda. Then I will address the matter of whether I believe in Coinmach. This getting old crap is not for sissies, is it?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com