Every week, I do my laundry.

It doesn’t sound like anything important, right?

We all do it to keep ourselves handsome and beautiful or, at the very least, from looking like a slob. It’s a basic chore every college student does, one that goes along with buying groceries, keeping the bathroom in our rooms clean and paying hard-earned cash to heartless cable companies for our daily doses of mind-rotting television.

But still, nothing really important or life-changing.

But when you have to do multiple things that take time out of your day in order to do this meaningless task, it becomes important.

Laundry shouldn’t be.

So why does Northeastern have to make washing clothes a bigger chore than it really is?

There is only one change machine inside a campus building. It is inside the Curry Student Center (CSC) game room and changes singles and fivers into quarters, surely destined for the Dance Dance Revolution machine set-up in the corner.

Unfortunately, if you don’t have either a one or five-dollar bill, you have to walk to the ATM, pull out a 10-dollar bill, then hit up every restaurant on the ground floor searching for someone that can break a 10-spot into two fives.

And let’s not even bring up the possibility that the machine may not even be working. I’ve had this happen to me three times after doing the “Change Shuffle,” and let me tell you, you just want to punch something when this happens to you.

Wollaston’s is hit-and-miss as well. Some days, you get lucky and some days, you don’t. Au Bon Pain tells you to buy something first.

Suffice to say, you can’t really trust local businesses on campus to be reliable change dispensers when the machine guys decide not to keep their maintenance schedules. The Husky dollars would be fine and dandy … if those machines didn’t conk out either. Not only that, we don’t have much change to work with after we’ve completed our laundry.

A campus-wide increase of laundry prices by a quarter was prompted by vendors Mac Gray for 2005. Resident Student Association president Smith Anderson said RSA caught wind of the unexpected price hike from a resident at one of their recent council meetings, and are now looking into the matter.

Four loads of laundry that used to cost an even $10 are now $12. Over time, the difference we throw into the Maytags adds up into something we could have used for a night out with our significant others, a shopping spree at the Pru or a nice three-hour stay at the bar for you 21+ people.

Why are we spending this much? At the very least, some of this should be heading for the school, right? Wrong. Andrew Loven, the manager for the gameroom and information desk inside the CSC, said all the money used in the gameroom’s change machine are collected AND go to Action Jackson Amusements, the guys who operate it.

For all the tuition money Northeastern rakes in per year, you think they’d break away from their new building spree for five seconds to use a slice of that dinero to stick a change machine in every dorm building.

It just seems to me that Northeastern has a problem with what students really need. Do we really need more buildings and other random things, which will raise our tuition to more obscene levels than they already are?

But since we can’t use that common sense until the NU community has a skyline that looks down at Boston with contempt, I hereby ask the administration to start playing hardball with Mac Gray in an attempt to get the old price of $1.25 per load back across campus, and to find a way to get Action Jackson to put their machines in every nook and cranny of the Husky kingdom. I want to see a machine in every building, every square, and every park, so no one will have to deal with doing the “Change Shuffle” ever again.

Lord knows we just love to get out in the cold winter, trudge to the ATM and do all this crap just to get clean clothes.

– Chris Estrada is sophomore journalism major and a member of the News staff.