A snowy evening.

All is quiet on the Harvard campus, floodlit buildings glowing against the pale peaceful background of a Massachusetts winter.

Or so it seems.

If you listen long enough you can hear a low whir, the steady hum of hundreds of continuously spinning machines. It emerges from underground, from tiny over-bright rooms tucked away in basements and steam tunnels where piles of abandoned clothing litter the floor like casualties of war.

Down there, beneath the snow and the cinderblock and the surface gentility, a hidden battle rages.

Doing laundry at Harvard is not an easy business. It seems simple enough: Amass clothing. Put clothing in machine. Add detergent, fabric softener and more loose change than you ever dreamed possible. Go away.

Maybe it should be that easy. But it isn't.

Because when you return, your clothing is no longer tumbling merrily in the washing machine where you left it. It is sitting in a damp, dejected heap on the decidedly unsanitary floor.

Where did you go wrong?

Interviews with students as they did their laundry this week suggest there are rules to the competitive clothes-washing game.

Whether or not students follow them depends on what their personal moral standards are, what their faith in the personal moral standards of others is--and whether they have enough quarters to rewash their laundry after t hat faith is proven woefully unjustified.

Rule 1: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

"When someone takes my stuff out, I'm pissed, because I usually wait [for others]" says Currier resident and launderer Haile N. Adamson '96.

Marc J. Kuchner '94, a Dunster House resident with years of laundering experience behind him, has developed a tougher attitude.

"I neither have qualms about taking stuff out nor am I upset when it happens to me," Kuchner says.