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When I was in college, the machines in my dorm building’s laundry room would send you an SMS when the cycle finished. It was super handy, and would be awesome t

by cmckn 3y ago

When I was in college, the machines in my dorm building’s laundry room would send you an SMS when the cycle finished. It was super handy, and would be awesome to have if your home is multi-level (or the machine is tucked away where no one can hear it scream)

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
So we have three laundry rooms here where I live, and they were all managed by CSC ServiceWorks until recently. When I first moved in, CSC had an amazing system setup, whereby you could go to their website and see a real-time animation of all the machines in the room, their current status, and their remaining time. This page updated very rapidly and always showed accurate information, including any machines that were out of service. Therefore, it was very easy for me to put together some laundry loads, and then navigate to that website and see exactly whether I'd be able to go downstairs and start my loads immediately, or how long I'd need to wait until machines were freed up for my purposes. Then they enshittified it. They took away the central payment kiosk and installed individual card readers on each machine. These card readers had some unholy mix of Bluetooth and WiFi on them and the new app was completely incompatible with the Android tablet I had at the time. Apparently it was mandatory to have both Internet and BT access before you could even start a machine anymore. To add insult to injury, they deprecated the public status website and walled up the status reports inside the app. In fact, you couldn't even get a report until you'd paid to start one of the machines, thus invalidating my old strategy of proactively checking for availability. Then there was a protracted battle between landlady and CSC whereby there were many malfunctions and accusations about whose responsibility it was. The pandemic struck, and there was some third-party disinfecting service that was supposed to be sanitizing machines, but left huge gobs of lint and detritus behind them all anyway. Eventually it came to a head, and the landlady severed their contract with CSC and brought in a new service company. They have apps and cash preloading and whatever and you know what? I stopped using the laundry room entirely. Now I bring my clothes to a Wash & Fold service, and have it professionally cleaned, because doing laundry is too strenuous for me anymore. Problem solved!

by cmckn 3y ago

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

So we have three laundry rooms here where I live, and they were all managed by CSC ServiceWorks until recently. When I first moved in, CSC had an amazing system setup, whereby you could go to their website and see a real-time animation of all the machines in the room, their current status, and their remaining time. This page updated very rapidly and always showed accurate information, including any machines that were out of service. Therefore, it was very easy for me to put together some laundry loads, and then navigate to that website and see exactly whether I'd be able to go downstairs and start my loads immediately, or how long I'd need to wait until machines were freed up for my purposes. Then they enshittified it. They took away the central payment kiosk and installed individual card readers on each machine. These card readers had some unholy mix of Bluetooth and WiFi on them and the new app was completely incompatible with the Android tablet I had at the time. Apparently it was mandatory to have both Internet and BT access before you could even start a machine anymore. To add insult to injury, they deprecated the public status website and walled up the status reports inside the app. In fact, you couldn't even get a report until you'd paid to start one of the machines, thus invalidating my old strategy of proactively checking for availability. Then there was a protracted battle between landlady and CSC whereby there were many malfunctions and accusations about whose responsibility it was. The pandemic struck, and there was some third-party disinfecting service that was supposed to be sanitizing machines, but left huge gobs of lint and detritus behind them all anyway. Eventually it came to a head, and the landlady severed their contract with CSC and brought in a new service company. They have apps and cash preloading and whatever and you know what? I stopped using the laundry room entirely. Now I bring my clothes to a Wash & Fold service, and have it professionally cleaned, because doing laundry is too strenuous for me anymore. Problem solved!