Öckerö gymnasium

The laundry war

As a rondman you are sort of an important figure on this ship, maybe not as important as the captain but still important. You are responsible for purring or in other words waking other students up before their watch and meal, emptying trash, changing towels in the bathrooms, keeping the boat afloat by making sure there isn’t a fire or leaking, and collecting data and managing the machineries and the VERY important job of doing the ships laundry at night.

So, there I stood at the watch shift after waking up at 03.30 as a rondman. My first thought was: “I was rondman 4 days ago and the post cycle is supposed to be at least 15 days.” Even though this bothered me a little bit I thought that if I am this post a lot now then maybe I don’t have to be it so much at the end of our little adventure across the Atlantic. I do my duties and am done with the machineries after around 10 minutes, taking the round beneath the deck and then trying to find my way around outside in complete darkness.

After getting a tiny injunction for using a flashlight on deck even though it was to find an invisible light switch underneath the back (the front of the boat) I got started with the ship’s laundry. I am at once greeted with a mountain of dried bedsheets, 2 finished washing machines with no free drying machines. On top of that, when I tried to find a sack to put the bedsheets in there is none to be found. When I ask our watch leader about it, she told me to take one from the kitchen that is used to carry groceries in so that I did and now the sheets probably smell like carrots and cheese. So, when I half an hour later have managed to cut the dry sheet pile to half its previous size and am back in the laundry room one of the drying machines is done so I put a pile of wet kitchen towels and cloths in it and put It in, unaware that the machine is in fact broken and turns itself off every 2 minutes.

At this point of time an hour has passed and it’s time to walk another round which I do as quickly as possible and still not miss a task. When its time to get back to the laundry room I finally realize that there is something wrong with the drying machine but I turn it back on and thankfully the machine next to it is finally done, so now I have ONE working drying machine because the third one in the corner that the rondman before me turned on will keep spinning for the whole 4 hour watch. This turns into a circle race; at the start of every hour a new round will start and be done in around 20-30 minutes to continue the war in the laundry room until the next hour starts. The broken laundry machine continues to turn itself off and I press it back on again. At 06.30 when the chef goes to work, she asks me if I can bring her kitchen towels to sea secure the kitchen with and I kindly explains to her that every single kitchen towel is in a drying machine that refuses to work, because after two and a half hours later the towels still aren’t dry. This makes her frown and tell me to bring them anyway which I do. Yet the war still continues with the cloths until it is time to get off watch and it becomes the next rondmans problem.

Ellen

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Öckerö seglande gymnasieskola
Björnhuvudsvägen 45
475 31 Öckerö

Telefon: 031-97 62 00
e-post: kommun@ockero.se