Foreigners and Drycleaning
I went to the cleaner’s the other day to pick up a suit and had an interesting interaction with the shop lady. Once our actual business was out of the way and we were just chatting, she wondered if she might ask a favor of me. I welcomed the opportunity to be helpful.
She told me that she has had some trouble with the coin laundry she opened up on the other side of the grocery store. She finds dusty detergent spills around the machines. The machines do not require any detergent because they automatically dispense it during the wash cycle. (They automatically dose the load with softener, too.) She asked me to create a message in English that she could put on a sign for the foreigners she suspected of causing the problem.
That made me stop and think.
I wrote out a little note: “These machines automatically dispense detergent and softener. Please do not use your own. Thank you.” But then I said that I didn’t know how effective it would be. You see, the vast majority of the foreigners on our island work for the ship-building factories. They are usually from China, Brazil, or the Philippines, as far as I know. In short, English may not be the best choice here. It’s more likely to work for the folks from the Philippines, I think, as many of them have studied English as a second language extensively. (And hey, I’m not trying to paint the Chinese or Brazilian workers with a broad brush, here. So forgive the generalizations – it’s entirely possible that some or all of them are quite comfortable with English.)
Also – it may not be foreign folks at all. It could be an absent-minded Japanese customer just as easily. Putting detergent in is a mistake you make at the beginning of washing a load of laundry, right? And since lots of coin washes lock until the load is finished, undoing the excess could be impossible anyway, even if the patron noticed their mistake written in bold on the face of the machine after having shut the door. (I’ve not used this particular one, so I don’t know if it locks.)
Anyway, I told her that she should tell me if the problems keep happening, and if so, that I’ll contact some folks at the local international association for help making a nice, polite, multilingual sign to the same effect. But hey – it only works if people see it and pay attention to it, right? Ha ha.
