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I live in a student apartment complex which has numerous groups of seven people who share a front door, kitchen and various utilities including a washing machine and dryer. Our dryer is rather troublesome, it violently convulses while doing its job and can be heard throughout all the rooms in our corridor which comprises our section of the apartment complex; it likely haunts the upper and lower levels of the building too. We had various arrangements for the dryer, including a timer that would stop it from continuing through the night as well as repeated efforts to create a culture where you constantly query the condition of your clothing and the necessity to continue the drying efforts.
One morning the power cable leading to the dryer was cut and the timer was stolen. This caused some consternation, we were all aghast as we wondered who the culprit would be. It could have been an inside job: perhaps it was the mysterious new tenant who kept to himself; maybe it was the person who had been campaigning to replace the dryer; possibly my neighbor who had been suffering from some personal issues. Or simply a visiting friend deciding to do someone a favor by removing the dryer.
Evidence pointing to this direction was the fact that there had been no party or something else to draw a crowd to our part of the building and we were the only ones to have the key. It seemed possible that there was a disgruntled outsider who took advantage of someone carelessly leaving the door open to destroy their object of hatred, but we reasoned against this because why would this person steal the timer and why would they have the tools on-hand to sever the cable?
Another tempting possibility to alleviate any internal suspicion was to suspect the student housing organisation: maybe they were acting on complaints about the noise and were intent to force us to accept their proposal of hiring a dryer directly from their organisation at a rather steep cost. But we investigated this and they denied this and in retrospect it seemed rather unlikely they would resort to violence when they can easily resort to legal means to compel us and the issue is not important to them anyway.
I have a fondness for detective fiction so I thought about setting up cameras to record future offenses, searching through people's rooms to see if they had any timers stashed away and so on, but it all seemed a bit ridiculous. My neighbor managed to replace the power cable and bought a new timer, so everything seemed alright anyway. I kept a closer watch on the dryer after that point, but nothing happened for a few weeks.
Meanwhile my kitchen knife went missing and the building started to empty out with people going home for the winter holidays. I had to dry some cloths and I activated the dryer. It rotated once, more violently than it's wont to do, and then seemed to short circuit as it stopped rotating and I smelled something burning. I also found my kitchen knife somewhere behind the dryer, although I don't know if someone merely used it to open the door of the dryer -- which is broken and can only be opened with a piece of metal jammed inside it, or if it was used to sabotage it. Most likely the dryer was merely at the end of its life span and had broken down of its own accord.
So it all seems a bit dubious and I'm a bit worried people will start to suspect me, I've frequently complained about the dryer and I own a timer of the same type as was stolen and I have no alibi. Also, I think people generally consider me weird and unstable. One of my neighbors jumped up as I approached the washing room somewhere late at night and scolded me for scaring her.
 
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Keep us updated.
From here on out you'd better sleep with one eye open and a knife under the pillow. You can never be too careful.
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I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I know how this ends.
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This is quite a complex problem.
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On December 23 2014 01:19 oBlade wrote:
I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I know how this ends.
I didn't do it! 
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Well now your only chance is to plant evidence on someone's else room and make them take the full blame. Who's the one you hate the most ?
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Also, I think people generally consider me weird and unstable. One of my neighbors jumped up as I approached the washing room somewhere late at night and scolded me for scaring her.
Don't worry about that. I scare random people when they don't see me coming, and I'm pretty sure I'm quite normal (and viewed that way). People might think that you're weird or unstable, but I don't think this alone is enough evidence of that.
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On December 23 2014 01:33 Grumbels wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2014 01:19 oBlade wrote:
I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I know how this ends. I didn't do it!
Perhaps you have dissociative identity disorder, and your alternate identity is secretly sabotaging the dryer.
Maybe all this time you have been the one doing it, and you had no idea!
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While you're at it, try and find Jimmy Hoffa's grave
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Hmmm, did someone take out an exorbitant life insurance policy for your dryer?
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Exactly the kind of blog I'd write if I was secretly destroying stuff!
/jkjk
I used to live in a place like that, things can go from small incident to Political Intrigue in 15 minutes.
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Interesting.
Maybe you're the culprit, using your blog on TL only to appear innocent. But then again, this would only make sense if one or more of your mates would browse TL, or if you would show it to them (in which case it would be too obvious). So it probably isn't that. But maybe you're just banking on us having that exact line of thought. Hmmm, what a complex issue.
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On December 24 2014 00:42 Pandemona wrote:So....why don't you buy a new one again? A dryer divided by 7 people isn't that expensive it is? Seems like standard sort of issues that arrive with sharing a building with 6 other people 
Yeah, but we argued over who would fund it, since some people will live here for only another year while others for five years. And some sort of payment system was deemed too complicated and arbitrary. In the end we said at since the dryer still worked we wouldn't bother with it, and now that it's broken I'll try to push for the student housing option since that's less fuss for me who will only live here for another few months.
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On December 24 2014 01:23 Grumbels wrote:Show nested quote +On December 24 2014 00:42 Pandemona wrote:So....why don't you buy a new one again? A dryer divided by 7 people isn't that expensive it is? Seems like standard sort of issues that arrive with sharing a building with 6 other people Yeah, but we argued over who would fund it, since some people will live here for only another year while others for five years. And some sort of payment system was deemed too complicated and arbitrary. In the end we said at since the dryer still worked we wouldn't bother with it, and now that it's broken I'll try to push for the student housing option since that's less fuss for me who will only live here for another few months.
If you're only there for another few months, why don't you just leave it alone? Its not your responsibility. I am sure you can find alternate ways to dry your clothes.
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This is going to end up being some kind of fight club style multiple personality situations. I'm calling it now.
You are not your dryer OP.
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http://imgur.com/8EGKWkB
Somehow yellow goo started to live inside it. My neighbor says it's not leftover curry or something but that it's some fungus.
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EPT
