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Norms vs code

The laundry room in the building I moved to and the laundry room where I moved from have very different rules but two rules that are in both rulesets are:

1. Clean the machine and the detergent compartment and leave it open

2. Clean the drier filter

Now to the weird part.

In the old place, people didn’t do the first one but almost always did a really good job on that second one.

In the new place, people are super diligent about doing the first one but are really sloppy about the second one. (Which is kind of too bad since it's easier to remove the drier lint right away and more difficult to do it after a while.)

That’s been a surprising lesson for me on how codified rules aren’t worth much compared to communal actual practice and actual habits.

If everybody knew what they wanted

There’d be nothing, nothing left