Should've Used Laundry View

I've never seen a show really nail laundry etiquette in the college sense, and really, it is a subject that should be discussed because so many people lack it. Tonight, ABC's new show (and a new favorite of mine) Castle decided to address it by having a dead body rolling around in the dryer.

The cops were talking about how the old lady found her in the dryer when she was going to take someone else's clothes out to put hers in, because someone else was being a jerk-off and left their clothes in the washer.

This brings up an interesting point: what is the appropriate grace period for commandeering a dryer? The old lady in this episode waited a full half hour for it, and then found the dead body (which one police man said served her right for going downstairs to grub through someone else's undies to use the dryer).

Now generally, I wait about 5 minutes until I go downstairs to pull someone else's laundry out of the dryer. It's rude, I understand. I really don't have much of an internal grace period because I firmly believe that when you're doing laundry, you should be there to take your stuff out. And if you're not, you should be able to deal with your clothes neatly piled on the table next to the machine. If you wait more than 5 minutes, people will take over the entire laundry room, using all 3 washers at once and being a laundry douche.

Furthermore, I don't take peoples' clothes out of the dryer until they are completely dry. I cannot stand when people take your clothes out of the dryer only 30 minutes in, because let's be honest: dryers on campus aren't that good. They do take the full hour to dry your clothes, and if you take them out halfway through, I can guarantee that your jeans and towels will still be damp to the touch. So for a woman to wait 30 minutes for someone to get their stuff out of the laundry in my eyes, is really effing polite.

This episode of Castle raises a few good questions about laundry. One, what amount of time is acceptable before someone takes over a dryer? Two, if Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson knew that illicit affairs in the laundry room could lead to murder, would Little Children ever be the same?