Laundry in a Bucket

My apartment for this year has many amenities, but laundry hookups are not among them. A nearby laundromat offers wash and fold services at $1.40 per pound, but I remembered vaguely from history books and from childhood in the village that it is theoretically possible to do laundry by hand. A bit of research and experimentation landed me with this method:

Materials
1 bucket
1 plunger
1 bottle dishwashing liquid
20 feet of clothesline
Clothespins to taste

Cut several small holes in the rubber part of the plunger so that water can run through. Put clothes in the bucket, fill it with water, and add a spoonful of dishwashing liquid. Plunge up and down and stir the clothes from side to side for about 5 minutes; this produces a similar agitation to washing machines, washboards, and beating clothes on rocks by the riverside. Pour out the soapy water and fill the bucket with new water to rinse. Plunge and stir for another 5 minutes. Pour out the water, wring out the clothes, and put them on the line to dry.

This method still has to be optimized, and isn't great for large loads of laundry, but I'm hoping it will keep my laundromat expenses modest through the year. It's also nice to be able to use the balcony for something, and nothing looks more homely than lines of drying laundry.

IRS Transcript Sonnet

How do I get an IRS transcript?
Let me count the ways, for this one task
Most baffling yet remains by Em'ry's ask
Else all financial offers will be stripped
To use the FAFSA widget would be nice
But errors ever plague the address field
On all online attempts, the cause concealed
Alas that foreign equals imprecise
All phone calls to the IRS expire
Amongst robotic menus without end
The four-five-o-six-T form sent by wire
Did not the transcript situation mend
A finish is in sight, but my desire
To be a future donor scarce ascends

Fun With Customer Service

Over the past couple weeks, I've been in contact with several companies to set things up for my last year of college. There's been a lot of phoning and emailing and some meeting in person, and while customer service politeness has been pretty even across the board, helpfulness has been a real rollercoaster between companies.

The natural gas company was by far the best-- when an online application failed to go through, I gave them a call. In addition to processing the application for me, they explained my options for the coming year, how natural gas distribution works in Atlanta, and what to expect in fees and service over the next few weeks.

A problem with my bank's website led to a 40 minute phone call where the person on the other end very much attempted to be helpful, but we could never get past the point where the buttons present on his screen were absent from my screen. I was trying to wire money internationally to St Peter's College where I studied for the past year, but the phone call ended with the bank representative promising to get IT to fix the website.

The St Peter's financial office was really great to work with; after a few weeks of emailing I worked out with them that I could pay my bill internationally by buying a meal plan from the college cafeteria. The mindset at St Peter's seemed to be that a student's main source of stress should be their studies, not finances or other logistics.

With no laundry hookups in my apartment, I decided to test out a local laundromat where you deposit your clothes in lockers and they are returned clean in a couple days. It's a sleek facility and I set up an account and delivered my first order with zero human interaction. About half an hour later, I got a call from a customer service rep to confirm my order and to answer any questions I had starting out. It was a nice gesture.

My recent visits to the Emory Financial Aid office have been illuminating in their own way, but I can't help but feel that some of the problem-solving flexibility that comes with human customer service has been lacking. When I run into problems with online forms, I'm referred to the same forms to find a solution for myself. In a way, I suppose, it makes sense because I'm hoping to receive money from Emory Financial Aid while I'm paying money to all the other companies I mention here.

In summary, thanks to customer service, I feel at the moment a great deal of goodwill towards my natural gas provider and varying degrees of satisfaction and frustration towards the many other companies and financial institutions that are a part of living life on the grid.

Purchasing Incentives

I've just moved into an unfurnished apartment and am now going about the business of filling it with necessary apartment things, prioritized by level of necessity. I got paper towels and such yesterday evening, and was looking into buying a mattress and some sheets some time in the next week or so. However, after spending the night in a sleeping bag on the floor, the first thing I did this morning was order an airbed on Amazon to get me through the next few days. Same-day shipping, even on weekends, seems to be an affordable option on many airbeds, which is greatly appreciated by me and, I suspect, many others who have at the last moment discovered that the 'hard' in 'hardwood floors' is not a linguistic coincidence.

Deluxe Crackers

Ingredients

Peanut butter crackers

Grape jelly

More peanut butter

Nacho cheese

Make deluxe crackers by spreading jelly, peanut butter, or nacho cheese onto already peanut-buttered crackers. Each mouthful is an explosion of flavor, except for the peanut butter peanut butter crackers of course, for which every mouthful is an explosion of peanut butter.

New Phone

This week, in honor of the new year, I decided that I would stop hanging on to my flip phone. In the past, I've worried that if I get a smartphone I'll accidentally start using it at restaurants and when I'm having conversations with people. On the other hand, there are several pros of smartphones that have accumulated over the years: the camera, internet access, and google maps in particular are what made my mind up.

The decision was a push as much as a pull. My old phone plan, for reasons beyond my understanding, jumped to $30 a month, so with my new $30 smartphone and its pay-as-you-go plan, I expect things will end up being cheaper than before. As I see it, using a pay-as-you-go service means that I'll either have an affordable phone bill or I'll become some sort of social butterfly, so it's really a win-win situation.

Happy Returns

I told myself that I would return to blogposting when I returned to Atlanta, and now it's all happening together. There's no telling what the future will hold, but with any luck this will keep going.

Returning to the US in general has meant getting a new phone, switching back to Fahrenheit when talking about temperature, and enjoying the services of websites (like Pandora) not necessarily accessible in many other parts of the world. It also means getting back in touch with familiar people and places.

One such place is the Walmart Supercenter near me, and on the subject of returns, I saw at the cash register a sign saying that non-defective airbeds in opened packaging were not eligible for cash returns. Fair enough, I think, in the grand scheme of things.

The weather is hot and the roads are long, but air conditioning is plentiful and I know the bus routes. It's good to be back.