Cleanliness is all in the timing.…

Laundry is a huge deal here. Obviously you need clean clothes everyday, but here it takes on a whole new dimension. Most places you have control over your laundry. If you get oreally desperate, you can take it to a Laundromat and throw in a ton of quarters to do your clothes yourself. Some bases I’ve been to, they have washers and dryers either in the dorms or nearby. Most hotels either offer a next-day service or offer a couple of washers and dryers for their customer’s use. Here you are pretty much tied into the laundry schedule.

The laundry schedule is the three-day cycle it takes to send out your clothes to be cleaned and returned. We are limited on water here (remember there is no potable water available, and we conserve water by championing the 3-min showers…). So, instead of providing washers and dryers for somewhere around 8,000 people here, they have contracted out with the local Marriott to do our laundry.

Now the process is quite simple, and the cost is great: free for you, the customer. The uniforms are pretty simple here, you have underwear, Air Force approved logo’d physical fitness gear, and your work clothes, either battle dress (cammies) or flight suits for the aviators. Most of us have a change of civilian clothes in case we get stranded off-station, but you can’t wear them around the base.

Anyway, timing is everything. You accumulate enough dirty clothes to leave you about three day’s worth left, then you take the dirty ones to the turn-in point. You fill out your slip, take them to the counter, and the nice Haji counts them up and drops them in a plastic bag, ties it off, and gives you the receipt..

Three days later, when you reach the end of your clothes, you go back to the pick-up point, present your slip, and they bring you out your freshly cleaned and pressed clothes! Great system if you plan right. Plan wrong and you either end up wearing dirty clothes, or leaving clothes behind when you head home.

When you get back to your room, you’re not finished yet. You have to go through all your clothes and try and find where they put the ID tapes that they use to mark your clothes and find them after they’ve all been washed. Sounds simple, but every sock, shirt, shorts, and article of underwear has a little sticker on it somewhere, sometimes where you can’t see it, and if you don’t take the time to remove it, the next time you put the clothes on, you’ll suddenly feel this irritating thing sticking into you in the most uncomfortable places… your side, the bottom of your foot, the small of your back, the back of your neck, etc… I pulled out my desert flight suits to pack for this deployment, and they still had their tags in the collar, three years after my last visit! Kind of like the stickers they put on furniture when you move. Years later you are still finding them. My Dad used to pay us a nickel for each tag we found after we unpacked and moved in a new house. We still missed some of them and would find stickers getting prep’ed for the NEXT move…