Some students take their laundry home to their parents for cleaning. Others find someone to wash it for them, or if they can afford it sign up for laundry services like Husky Express or take everything to a dry cleaners. For most students, a reality of college life is washing, drying, and perhaps folding or hanging clothes. Unfortunately, too often students run into trouble in the laundry room. Broken machines, card readers not working, or machines that refuse to accept money are some of the problems that typically arise. There's also the problem of the laundry room being too crowded, meaning that you bring your clothes to the laundry room to find out that all the machines are in use.
Fortunately at Northeastern, thanks to efforts a few years ago by the Resident Student Association's Housing Services Committee, we have LaundryView. LaundryView is a website where students can take a look at a laundry room and see if machines are available, check the status of a washer or dryer, and even report problems so that repair staff can be sent out to fix a problem washer or dryer or fix a card reader that isn't working. Sometimes when problems are reported they are fixed the same or next day. Reporting problems that you run into not only benefits you the next time you're in the laundry room, but it also benefits your fellow Huskies.
The Resident Student Association is currently working with the University administration to look into the possibility of enhancing laundry view to provide optional text message alerts so that you can receive a text message notification when your wash or dry cycle is finished. This enhancement is known as "Text Me." According to a press release from Mac-Grey, the company that runs the laundry systems at Northeastern and several other colleges and universities, "Text Me" was well received by students at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the text message alerts were preferred 3-to-1 over e-mail or instant message notifications. The greatest benefit of "Text Me" seems to be that the text message alerts led to students being promoted to remove their laundry as soon as the cycle finished, making the machine available to someone else quicker.
If you ever have a laundry problem, idea, or suggestion, the Resident Student Association is listening. Just e-mail laundry@neu.edu, and the Housing Services Committee will get back to you.
