Air-Dry Obsessed And Airheaded

This takes place while I am in college, living in an apartment affiliated with the university. This means it’s not run by the university like a dorm but only students can live on this property. This also means we have a real apartment, with a kitchen, washer, and dryer, our own bedrooms, etc.

When we move in, however, our dryer starts smoking like crazy the first time we use it. We discover it is jam-packed with dryer lint as if the previous tenants had never cleaned the filter, and it is clogging the entire line. We get maintenance to replace the smoky dryer easily, but they’ve forgotten to flush the line. There’s no airflow and our clothes aren’t drying.

I have a chat with maintenance about this.

Me: “The new dryer seems to be working great; we just need all the lint flushed out.”

Maintenance: “This is a brand new dryer we just gave you! It can’t be broken.”

Me: “Oh. It isn’t. It heats up totally fine; we just need the rest of the vent flushed out.”

Maintenance: *Condescendingly* “You know you have to actually turn it on, right? Your clothes won’t dry unless you turn it off of ‘air-dry only’.”

I look at the dryer, currently NOT set to air-dry.

Me: “Yeah, I know how to do laundry. Again, it works great and is heating up, but nothing will dry properly because it seems like it’s blocked.”

Maintenance: “Look. This is the air-dry setting. You don’t want it on this. Watch. To dry clothes, we set them to this setting or this setting and turn the knob. Then we…”

The maintenance man continued to explain how to operate the dryer to me patronizingly and ignored me when I kept trying to explain the issue. He probably spent fifteen minutes giving me a demonstration! He marked the ticket as fixed and didn’t do anything further.

After I complained to the front office, they finally sent someone to do what we’d asked for in the first place. 

Surprise! The dryer worked perfectly after that.