Last month, HDH announced the emergency closure of every laundry room on campus, providing no further explanation for the decision. This past week, HDH sent out an email regarding the shutdown: “Attention residents: Housing, Dining and Hospitality has heard your complaints about the dryers. We have worked tirelessly to find a solution. We are pleased to announce that every dryer will be replaced with a state of the art pizza oven, effective immediately.”
The new “laundry ovens” have a simplistic design: a giant slab of stone heated to 400°F. Because some clothes melt under these conditions, HDH has posted signs instructing students to remove their loads within 30 seconds. For students’ convenience, HDH has placed communal pizza peels to remove the laundry. To many administrators’ surprise, the change was well-received. One student, Donatella Napoli, expressed delight for the new possibilities in fashion, saying,“Plaid is out, Maillard reactions are in!”
This excitement did not last long; two days after the change, users on r/UCSD flooded the servers with reports of other students using the ovens to make actual pizzas. One student posted an image of a laundry oven filled with grease stains and anchovy heads, captioned, “How am I supposed to use this?”
HDH has yet to respond.