Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash

I was having a conversation today with a fellow non-Swede colleague when he mentioned the dreaded word…. tvättstuga, which loosely translates to washing cabin. Long a socialist and environmentally forward thinking country, the tvättstuga is a staple of every basement in every Swedish apartment block. And like many things in Sweden, there are deep-rooted social rules governing how you behave in the tvättstuga. Rules that Swedes take for granted, because they are part of their DNA. Rules that are governed by respect for the the time and space of your comrades.

In the capital, the demand on the laundry room is high and governed in most buildings by a booking board — 31 days separated into time slots. Everyone who lives in the building has their own booking marker, which you move to the time and date you want to use the laundry room with a special key. As most rooms are only in operation between 08:00 and 22:00, getting an evening slot during the week or a weekend slot is as rare as winning the lottery.

If someone tells you they cannot make an event — even if it’s your wedding — because they’ve got laundry time, that’s a legit excuse. In fact, laundry time is the only thing people will not juggle on their busy schedules.

So, let’s get back to the word, tvättstuga, and talk about what it really means. There is so much emotion tied up in those 10 letters: rules, order, neighbors, solidarity and who didn’t remove their sodden dryer fluff from the communal towel?

In Sweden, you can cancel a meeting up to 5 minutes before it’s due to start, you can postpone lunch dates 20 times and no-one bats an eyelid, but dare to suggest that you might not bother going to the laundry room (because you have something more interesting to do like watching paint dry) you will quickly become a social outcast.

Entire lives revolve around laundry-room booking times and the millions of etiquette rules, that no Swede ever bothered to write down for us silly foreigners because… well you just wouldn’t think of stuffing a load on 10 minutes before your allotted time was due to run out now would you?

Because you would, like any normal person be mopping the floor at that point! And you would of course have already cleaned out the soap-powder dispenser thoroughly so that the next person wont bleach their black undies, and you have removed all the fluff from the dryer now, haven’t you?

Because if you don’t, you are in grave danger of being severely reprimanded by them…the laundry-room police! They will threaten you with all sorts of things if you don’t abide by the rules that you’ve never read. The ultimate being the removal of your booking key, so you can no longer use the laundry room and thereby become a social pariah as you can no longer blame your lack of spontaneity on a laundry-room booking, but on your lack of clean clothes!