And, did you know that my apartment building changed the hours of operation for the laundry room from, well, all the damn time, to a miserly 9a to 11p schedule? Considering I typically do my best work in the laundering department between the hours of 2a and 4a, I am quite chagrined. As a result of not really paying attention to the little note announcing this change, I was unaware that the door would be closed and locked promptly at 11 this evening.

Why yes, hard as it is to believe with my exciting life, I somehow find myself doing laundry on a Saturday night. And because I do the wash as infrequently as any single, red-blooded American male would, the untimely closure of the laundering facilities has resulted in approximately 100 semi-dry, failed dot-com promotional t-shirts rotting in an industrial dryer down on the third floor. Also, I have no pants.

On a happier note, though, one of the very few perks of paying the exorbitantly high rent in my building is that the closed-circuit security cameras are somehow linked into the cable system. Including the security camera that watches the laundry room. Judging solely on the basis of image quality, I’d say they were spliced with paper clips and crossed fingers. Nevertheless, the end result is the spectacular luxury of having a view of the laundry room on channel 111 of my cable box. No, that’s not a joke.

So naturally, the Laundry Channel is my favorite television broadcast. Not in a creepy, Sliver kind of way, but in a “hmm, TV sucks, let’s watch ordinary people live their lives” sort of way. I think the purported purpose of this voyeuristic video camera is so that you can see when your dryer stops spinning and go down and fetch your spring-fresh garments. Presumably before they lock the damn place up and hold your t-shirts hostage. Even, say, an *NSync t-shirt featuring Lance Bass. If one were to wear that sort of thing.

Now, obviously, the extravagance of remotely monitoring one’s laundry instead of being forced to endure the traditional laundromat experience of reading old issues of Cosmo while sitting in stifling, Downy-scented heat raises the question of exactly how spoiled, lazy and entitled the residents of the Upper East Side of Manhattan can get. This is an issue I’d rather not explore. Instead, as always, I’d prefer to focus on the benefits this bizarre confluence of events affords me.

For the next few hours, I am going to put down the computer, sit back on the sofa and bask in the warm glow of the television as I watch my boxer shorts dry.

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