Laundry and Parallelism
Oct. 3rd, 2003 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
compilerbitchBraved the St. Edmund's laundry for the first time this morning.
Did the obvious thng: took washing to laundry. Machines need cards. Cards are 5 pounds each, with 20 credits. 5 credits = 1 wash, 1 credit = 10 minutes in the dryer. No card dispenser present, however. Notice saying that one can be found at the foot of A staircase in the main building. Fair enough. Go to foot of A staircase. Find photocopier, coke machine, fire escape. No card dispenser.
Wander around for a bit.
Find someone to ask. I am shown to a locked cupboard at the bottom of B staircase, containg many and varied items of junk, a payphone, a condom dispenser, a machine that sells cards for the photocopier and (gasp) the prized laundry card machine. Which claims to like 2 pound coins (with which I was well endowed), though on experimentation proved not to in practice. Some fumbling for smaller chang later, I scraped together the requisite funds and was soon the proud owner of a laundry card.
From here, the news gets better. The laundry contains three big industrial washing machines and twe enormous dryers. I soon realised the concrete advantages of parallelism -- 'waiting faster', as Prof. CAR Hoare liked to put it. I found the simple pleasures of being able to do all of my washing, all at once, rather than spreading the pain across most of an otherwise wasted day.
Did the obvious thng: took washing to laundry. Machines need cards. Cards are 5 pounds each, with 20 credits. 5 credits = 1 wash, 1 credit = 10 minutes in the dryer. No card dispenser present, however. Notice saying that one can be found at the foot of A staircase in the main building. Fair enough. Go to foot of A staircase. Find photocopier, coke machine, fire escape. No card dispenser.
Wander around for a bit.
Find someone to ask. I am shown to a locked cupboard at the bottom of B staircase, containg many and varied items of junk, a payphone, a condom dispenser, a machine that sells cards for the photocopier and (gasp) the prized laundry card machine. Which claims to like 2 pound coins (with which I was well endowed), though on experimentation proved not to in practice. Some fumbling for smaller chang later, I scraped together the requisite funds and was soon the proud owner of a laundry card.
From here, the news gets better. The laundry contains three big industrial washing machines and twe enormous dryers. I soon realised the concrete advantages of parallelism -- 'waiting faster', as Prof. CAR Hoare liked to put it. I found the simple pleasures of being able to do all of my washing, all at once, rather than spreading the pain across most of an otherwise wasted day.