The Idler

Hospital Laundrette

I got paid 18 pence an hour extra to work with dirties at the hospital laundrette. It wasn’t worth it. The laundrette was a hot, loud cathedral-sized warehouse filled with gigantic tumble driers, massive washing machines, and very strange people all dedicated to cleaning the bedding, surgical gowns, nappies and towels of the entire hospital. Masses of dirty laundry would come down these big shoots. They would be covered in shit, piss, blood, and once, with what looked like someone’s kidneys. As the new employee, you were on dirties. This meant you had to stand under these shoots, catch the laundry, and transfer it into a washing machine. You spent most of the day with your face in, or near, piss. After finishing work, your nostrils were impregnated. Everything smelt of urine: your body, your food, your girlfriend, and your mother. It took three weeks after quitting before I could smell again.

It was literally the craps. But there was an upside: the pleasure in someone else having to do it once you’d moved on. I was shifted, promoted if you will, to machine operator, after I had persuaded a similarly down-on-his-luck friend to join the laundrette, who as the new employee was now on dirties. My new job was to press a button when my machine made a funny noise. It was a great job, made even idler by sitting on the floor and using a broom handle to press the button. Such initiative didn’t go unnoticed, and I was moved on to bigger machines with more buttons, some of which flashed.

The denizens of the laundrette were insane. The great joke was to switch on one of the room-sized tumble driers while someone was inside cleaning it. My friend did this to the laundrette’s psychopath. It really was very funny watching the psychopath -now sporting a cartoon Afro and wielding a steel bar - chase my pal the length of the building to the outside world. The departure of my friend left a vacuum on dirties that needed filling. After tasting the sweet nectar of being a machine operator, one of the elite, I was fucked if I would go back to tasting piss, so walked out too, into a clich�d sunny day.

Ralph El Turk