Laundromats, Careless or Just Plain Stupid Behavior? You Decide

The dictionary defines careless as “inattentive, negligent, reckless or unworried,” but the definition of stupid is “lacking ordinary activity of mind.” We all know stupid when we see it, don’t we? Many times I have seen stupid things happen and thought the person involved was, indeed, stupid; however, when such things happen to me or to loved ones, careless is the word that comes to mind. I have seen all of the following occurrences with my own eyes. Momentarily careless, or just plain stupid? You be the judge.

Laundromats are prime observation spots for careless/stupid behavior; if you hang around a Laundromat for awhile you won’t have to wait long to see something interesting. Here are two examples:

I noticed a construction worker taking a load of jeans out of a washer. As he pulled out the first pair, he began cursing and shook the jeans over the open washer. A nice, minty smell wafted up. The jeans had strands of a black substance all over them and didn’t look clean at all; they just smelled clean because he had left a can of Copenhagen chewing tobacco in one of his pockets. What a mess! He had to wash the whole load again.

I saw a man in his early 20s come into the Laundromat with a big pail of cloth diapers. The smell indicated that they had apparently been used recently by a baby. The man opened the washer, put in some coins, and pushed the “hot” button. He then poured the pail of diapers in. He added some detergent and next poured in an entire half-gallon of liquid bleach. After the diapers finished the wash cycle, he opened the washer and began to pull out the diapers. Disbelief was on his face as he saw the gauze diapers shredded in his hands; the bleach had eaten holes in all of them. He just threw the whole mess in the dryer. Poor baby!

Have you ever washed money that was in your pockets? Yeah, me too, and it comes out of the washer so shiny. A man gave my husband a five-gallon bucket of coins that all had a white, powdery substance on them, and the coins were all stuck together. He told him that he had been throwing his change into the bucket for some time; there were hundreds of dollars of change in there. He looked at the bucket of change one day and thought, “This money is filthy. What can I do to clean it up?” His solution was to pour a jug of bleach on the money; however, he didn’t rinse it with water immediately but just let the money sit in the bleach. It eventually dried, and the coins all stuck together. My husband tried various remedies to get the money unstuck for him. Baking soda, boiling a few coins in water, and various chemicals were tried. Nothing worked except for sanding with a Dremel, but how labor intensive do you want to get with a penny? If anyone knows an easy remedy for removing dried bleach from money, please comment.

Cooking often separates the stupid from the careless. Once I had friends over for dinner. I was making a pizza, and a guest asked if she could do anything to help. Since I’d forgotten to get some grated cheese, I gave her a package of sliced mozzarella and a cheese grater. When she handed me the bowl of grated cheese, I noticed that she had grated the white paper that separated the cheese slices as well. Not being able to think of a way to separate the shredded paper from the shredded cheese, I had to tell her what she’d done, since I didn’t think anyone would want to eat paper.

I watched a man at a gas station filling his car with diesel. His wife and a bunch of kids were inside the car, and after he’d put in a few gallons, his wife leaned out of the window and said, “Why are you putting diesel in my car? This isn’t your truck!” He jumped to attention and jerked the nozzle out of the car while his wife gave him withering looks. He then filled the rest of the tank with unleaded gas. When they left the station, the car backfired loudly, and all the kids screamed. A big puff of black smoke came out of the exhaust, and the car backfired again as it lurched down the highway.

Many years ago I had a friend who didn’t have a microwave. She always forgot to thaw out frozen meat for dinner, and she usually remembered the meat about an hour before she started cooking. In desperation one day she put the frozen meat on her back door steps so the sun would thaw it out fast. She did this a couple of times with no ill effects and so made it her standard defrosting practice; however, she stopped leaving meat on her back steps after a stray dog came by and devoured her supper.

I used to be a high-school teacher, and cheating often brought out the careless and stupid in students. I sent a boy to another teacher’s room empty room to take a makeup test; the teacher was in the room monitoring him. He returned with the test, and as I graded it I noticed that his answers were bizarre. He had answered true-and-false questions with ABC answers, multiple choice questions with fill-in-the-blank answers, etc. Before I finished grading, the other teacher came to my room and showed me a scrap of paper she had taken from him; it contained the answers from a previous test of that chapter, but not the one he had taken. I questioned him about his stupid/careless answers. He said that he had noticed that the answers didn’t fit but he hadn’t noticed until he was halfway through the test, and since he didn’t know any answers anyway so he just decided to stick with the ones on his sheet. His grade: 0.

I went to a sidewalk sale at K-Mart, and a teenaged girl was manning the outside cash register. Many of the items were marked down 50%, and I got several that had originally been $1.00. I was in a bit of a hurry, and I was perplexed when the girl took out a calculator and began to calculate the sales price of each of the $1.00 items. I told her that they would all be 50 cents, but she gave me a look and said that she had been instructed to use her calculator. It was a long transaction.

My kids rolled up some pennies, and I took them to my bank. The bank instructed me to write my checking account number on each one of the penny rolls for identification purposes in case the pennies were not all there. A couple of weeks later I got an official typed letter in the mail informing me that one of the rolls was a penny short and that they had deducted the one cent from my checking account.

I bought a cute Halloween suit for a child while I was living in New Hampshire, a state that does not have sales tax. I bought it at a large, nationally know discount store that starts with W, and after I returned to Texas I found that the suit didn’t fit the child. I returned it to one of the same stores in Texas, and the clerk gave me back Texas sales tax with the refund. I showed her on the receipt that I hadn’t paid any tax, but the clerk insisted that I had to take the tax because the register was always right.

I decided to stop at an automatic car wash while on a recent vacation to Montana. A woman in an SUV was ahead of me, and she was halfway out of her car trying to put in her money. She was putting a card in a slot on the payment board, swiping it, and then looking at the light that supposed to turn green and then putting the card back in again. She repeated this process several times. Finally, she got back in her car, opened a wallet and got out some dollar bills, which she successfully inserted into the machine. When I got to the payment board, I noticed that the machine did not take debit or credit cards, only cash.

I could go on and on with careless/stupid stories, and I’m sure you could too. Only careless, or downright stupid? Only you can decide.