It’s Not The Stains!
At the end of the school year, college students who live on campus leave the dorm with their overpriced unread textbooks, their stale overpriced gourmet weed, their souvenirs of hookups and usually at least one set of annoying overpriced oversized Extra Long sheets that only fit dorm beds. The fate of these sheets says a lot about you.
Alienated Rich Family
Mailed home by the concierge moving service arranged for by your father’s assistant, your sheets are unpacked by a housekeeper you don’t recognize (what happened to the previous one you liked so much?). The housekeeper ignores the shocking stains and carefully washes and irons the sheets for next year. Later the next housekeeper will follow her instructions to throw them away and replace them with new sheets in the fall. You rarely see your parents and it is possible they don’t love you.
Hyper-Attentive Affluent Family
You are picked up in the family Volvo and return home to a welcome party. While you are enjoying your steak, your sheets spin in the drier. Your mother will fold them and put them away in a linen closet with a special shelf for XL school sheets until you need them again in the fall. The steak is so delicious even though officially you are vegan.
Average Middle-Class Family
Although they are happy to see you, your parents are annoyed that you left your dirty laundry in the back of the car for the first week of vacation. Eventually, your dad dumps your laundry in the front hall where it blocks the bathroom door. The elderly cat pees on it. After another week your mom drops it on your bed on top of your weed and your souvenirs. In the fall you can’t find your sheets. It is possible you threw them away rather than have to wash them. Lesson learned: just ask your mom nicely and she would have washed them for you.
Lower Middle-Class Family
You will sleep on your dorm sheets over vacation. Just tuck them in at the end, it does not matter that they are extra long. Sheets can last 10-15 years if you take care of them. You will still be using your dorm pillowcases for the next decade. They remind you of college for good and ill. The top sheet will cover the couch in your first apartment. When the elastic on the contour sheet fails you can cut it up for cleaning rags.
Poor Family
You never had any sheets. The extra expense on top of the cost of getting to school and the overpriced textbooks was too much and you slept on a discarded school logo blanket you found in the common room. You do have an excellent pillow though. It was a gift from your roommates’ dads who noticed you were missing one and picked up an extra for you when they went back to Bed Bath and Beyond to get some missing items for their child. When you bring the logo blanket home you get a lot of ribbing about it from your brother who didn’t get to go to college, but your mom handwashes it, dries it on the clothesline, depills it, and saves it as a souvenir. Congratulations! You had the smallest carbon footprint.
Hard-Working Family
Like many students, you live in your car. (As much as 18% of college students are homeless). Your mother works as a housekeeper and gives you some sheets her employer was throwing away. The high thread-count sheets make the back of the car feel more cozy. Every morning you carefully roll the sheets up into a college logo giveaway tote the university spends tens of thousands of dollars providing new freshmen. Working on the dorm crew gives you a chance to sneak into the laundry room to wash your sheets once a month. You take very good care of those sheets, there are no stains. When your sister starts college, you pass them on to her. You hope she won’t be a homeless student also, but she is.
Faraway Family
Super rich students who live far away don’t bother bringing their gorgeous luxury sheets home. They are off to their summer internship at NATO anyway. Someone will have new sheets sent to the dorm in the fall.
Poorer students who live far away can’t afford the extra baggage charges for sheets. The cost of transporting the sheets back and forth is more than replacing them at Walmart in the fall.
Left behind in the dorm hallway, your used sheets are seized by sharklike moms at pickup who circle the throwaway piles looking to offset their parental tuition costs with castaways of the even-richer parents. If your sheets are particularly nice and look good after bleaching, that mom may sell them on Facebook Marketplace.
The summer RA who is moving into the dorm as you are leaving scouts the pile to outfit their room. Sheets are gross and of little interest, they want your dorm fridge, microwave or the breadmaker and unused mixes your mother gave you for Christmas when you mentioned a passing interest in baking.
Rejected by the first round of parental pickers, some sheets are found by the dorm cleaning crew who regarded the castaways of the privilege as a perk of the job until eco-conscious groups started arranging for donation bins on move-out day.
Donation bin sheets are sorted into:
Good Enough To Re-Sell To People In Need Competing With Hipster Thrifters
Send To A Foreign Country Undermining Their Economy
Landfill & Incineration. Note: Most donated items end up in landfills.
Tight-Knit Family
Like 32% of students you didn’t finish college. You bought your sheets at Goodwill the summer before freshman year with high hopes. But it was impossible to keep up with the two jobs you needed and the college workload. Then your mother was fired after she was injured on the job as a housekeeper and you needed to go home and help her out. Your college dorm sheets are a souvenir of the crippling debt you still carry from an unfinished degree. When your cousin takes the sheets to make a protest banner demanding CANCEL COLLEGE DEBT NOW you are thrilled. But your loans don’t qualify for cancellation and you end up working for the garbage crew at the college you dropped out of. Your first job is picking up the stuff left behind by Goodwill. Through it all your mother supports you, and you know she loves you.
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