Remember in college on Sunday night when everybody realized that there were no clean clothes for the week?  There was an understanding — a culture — of when and how the washing machines were used.  If the machines were full and the buzzer on my load rang out, my clothes were fair game to be unloaded and left on the table.  That didn’t change when my buddies and I moved into an apartment together.  If your clothes were in the wash, they might make it to a pile on your bed (or they might make it to a pile on the floor). These were the rules.  I learned from my wife that the rules were different in their apartment of girls.  The rules were neither better or worse, just very different.  Everyone understood them. 

But what if you don’t know the rules or the rules are different and no one told you.  On a recent road trip, we packed as lightly as we could knowing that we would wash clothes along the way.  At one stop, my wife began the laundry in the empty room with the one washer and one dryer.  She started the load of wash and came back to the room having set the alarm on her phone to match that of the machine.  Evidently, one of the two is out of sync with the satellites and I doubt it’s the clock on her phone (which coincidentally has more computing horsepower than the spaceship that landed on the moon).  When she returned someone had inserted themselves into the process, taking the dryer.  Fine enough, except that there was only one washing machine.  Perhaps they washed them while they wore them in the shower?  Frustrated, she returned to the room, having calibrated her phone to the timer that doesn’t keep time.  By this point, we’re creeping up on midnight and running out of the energy necessary to maintain decorum.  Magically, the clothes disappeared and she was able to finish the load.  

Two cities later, she’s in the same situation: late into the evening, no clean socks for tomorrow, single machine.  This time, she stayed with the clothes and when the washing was complete, she pulled the clothes out and got ours started.  Per her norm, she began folding the stranger’s wares. Then she stopped.  Our children have their names on the collars of their shirts so that there’s little room for argument before school.  These clothes were tagged with a different name: US Marshall.  She crisped up her creases and left the room in a panic. Am I going to be arrested for folding a Marshall’s undershirt?  Will they give me a medal of honor for my public service? Were my creases tight enough? What is a Marshall anyway?

She returned to our clothes to find them still spinning in the washing machine and the Marshall’s underwear gone.  Thankfully, no arrests in mid-Pennsylvania. 

What were the rules? 

How did the rules change when the stranger became someone? 

How did the experience shift when that someone became someone seemingly important?

I thought my wife would pass out the next morning when at breakfast she walked out to find 30+ uniformed (and completely unrelated) Air Force officers.  Thankfully, they folded their own underwear.