Ah, the joys of homelessness, where every worthless-scum born bully in a position to exert the petty tyranny of the morally bankrupt goes out of his way to make sure you feel like dirt.
Take, for example, "Paul" (he refused to further identify himself), at Mammoth Laundromat, 4363 North Cedar Avenue, Fresno, California, doing his best to protect his business establishment from one of those (paying customer) nasty homeless veterans.
It's not that he has much to protect; the cockroaches running around the floors can fend for themselves, and the overpriced washers (the cheapest washer in the place costs $2.75 to operate, while a much more run down but cleaner, and roach free, establishment three miles away in Clovis at Helm and Shaw starts its pricing at $0.75 for a washer that will hold the same size load, and a very nice and friendly laundromat at Clovis and Shaw starts at $1.50 a washerload) are their own best bet at keeping customers and similar riff-raff away.
The Puritans used to claim that cleanliness was next to Godliness; perhaps they were right, but for the homeless, cleanliness is next to impossible. With champions of fair play like "Paul" around, we can make sure the reputation of the homeless as "dirty" has no chance of recovery.
So, promptly at 08:00, I drag my ruck dolly (xanthianese for "jumbled-mess-carrying two-wheeled furniture cart") in the front door of Mammoth Laundromat, to the snide "looks like you're moving" from "Paul". "No, I'm homeless, this is how I get around, but I still need to wash clothes." It is fairly hard not to pick me out as homeless, since hanging from the side of one of the two steamer trunks that make up most of my ruck dolly load is a fair-sized sign "Example Homeless Veteran, Lest Clovis Forget" that has been there for most of a year, since my wife dropped me on the street and I found out about Robbins versus Pruneyard, 1978, the Supreme Court decision giving everyone essentially the same rights to freedom of expression as in a public park, in publically accessable business places such as Mammoth Laundromat. All else being equal, you cannot be accused of tresspassing in such a place while employing your first amendment freedom of expression rights. [Clue to the clever.]
It takes me a long time to unwrap the straps that make this ruck portable, but by 08:30 I have clothes spinning in a washer, from the top trunk, being washed in soap from the box in the bottom trunk. Keeping six changes of clothes available to myself means I'm towing one hundred fifty to two hundred pounds of ruck, depending on my food supply situation, one handed since my left arm is partially prosthetic and so mostly decorative, everwhere I go, but it is worth it to have the chance to put on clean clothes every other day, and it was barely a mile walk from the Fresno State University campus to Mammoth Laundromat.
Since the smell of not-recently-washed me after dragging two hundred pounds through the sweat-provoking morning Fresno "irrigated-desert" heat would offend a saint, to avoid stiffling the few visible stray other customers, I move myself and my "stuff" out of the central area and into the "television room", a heavily passed-through wide spot with benches on the way to the toilet, where I take advantage of an accessible wall outlet for my laptop, to continue my research software development studies in computational complexity and analysis of algorithms, which I share on the Net for hobbiests and the research community. See: Traveller for a release older than the one I was working on that morning (2002/05/07).
Don't, by the way, be misled by the Mammoth Laundromat yellow pages add touting its "Television Room"; yes it is a room, yes it has a television, but the establishment is so hard up for electricity (see below), the lights are kept off (with special switches to make sure mere customers cannot turn them on to walk to the restroom safely) and so is the TV set. The roaches, like the bigots, hate the light and love the dark, so this area has lots of bugs (in my hour and a half there, I found roaches crawling on me three separate times, and lost count of the ones scuttling across the floor), and dead end jobs like laundromat day staff attract lots of bigots, one of whom, "Paul", has had the unwisdom or misfortune to insult a rather unusual man with a laptop in his hand and earn for himself and the establishment where he works the glaring spotlight of publicity you are reading.
If you enjoy looking at a dark screen, I suppose the "Television Room" in the ad is the literal truth, but to most people it would count as deceptive advertising. The "free drying" isn't much better, since with the high price of washing, it costs more to wash and dry a load of clothes at Mammoth Laundromat than at other nearby laundries. Since the laundry is relatively close to California State University at Fresno's campus, perhaps this is just a part of the general tendency of merchants in the area to jack up prices to rip off college kids too naïve to comparision shop. [I've noticed a large bottle of beer at the Seven/Eleven stores across the street from campus is half a dollar more expensive than at the same chain two miles further from campus, and college kids are mostly not even old enough to drink. One wonders, then, at whom the high prices are targeted. Could Seven/Eleven be deliberately selling beer to minors? Horrors! Perish the very thought!]
Well, I got quite a bit of new code to work correctly, adding floor and ceiling estimators to the exact value line Traveller can display in its status panel, while my clothes spun clean and then spun dry, and since I was in a dingy dark room, I stuck a CD in my laptop and listened to the wonderful 1920's and 1930's depression era music from the O, Brother Where Art Thou movie soundtrack, and, being far from the madding crowd, accompanied the laptop speakers with my frog-voiced attempts to sing.
I was alerted by my collar alarm clock (a re-purposed glorified electronic egg timer, at my senior citizen age, you need all the reminders you can get) that my laundry was dry, fetched and folded my clothes, put them in the top steamer trunk, now clean, spent the twenty minutes to strap my ruck dolly from fully disassembled mode (there are eight major components to get lashed together plus the dolly, and lots of minor clip-on stuff) to street-ready mode to drag back to where I could finally bathe and change into clean clothes, sat down to test my changed software and wrap up my work, and in pops "Paul".
"Are your clothes dry?" [I'm sure he challenges all his customers at volume and threateningly about the state of their laundry — stay away from this place — or is it just that he likes to bully the downtrodden do you think?]
"Why yes, they are." [Ever polite even under provocation, I start handing "Paul" enough rope to hang himself.]
"Then its time you got out of here." [Notice the use of the usual "the customer is always right" polite speech so common in the more successful business establishments. I wonder if he talks to his mother like that? Or to his employer?]
"Is my being here a problem for you?" [Something about retired Lieutenant Commanders and backing down in the face of bullies just isn't happening for "Paul" here, perhaps he should have started his bullying in a more tentative mode to explore the dangerous territory he was about to enter.]
"Yes it is, you're using our electricity and not paying for it," pointing to the wall outlet from which my laptop is sipping electricity at about the rate of a refrigerator light bulb. [Silly me, I thought since neither the promised TV nor the lights needed for safety were in use, there would be lots left over for me, but apparently Mammoth Laundromat is suffering a power shortage, or perhaps an ethics shortage, it is hard to tell.]
"Well, we can't have that, so in the future I'll be sure to spend my laundry money elsewhere." [Wait for it...]
"You just do that, we don't want homeless around here." [Got him! Gaffed and boated a bigot!] "I guess you can't find other businesses to plug in your computer." [Yep, he definitely sees the computer, and he still doesn't understand he is staring into a loaded weapon.] "Just get you and your 'homeless veteran' mess out of here." [Yep, he sees the sign, too, he is now in violation of federal law as well as simple Christian morality: "I was hungry and you fed me, homeless and you took me in." — "But Lord, when did we do these things for you?" — "As you have done unto the least of these, so you have done to me." That's at least not too far off for a flaming atheist who knows more about practicing Christian ethics than most Christians will ever imagine. Ask the dozen street kids I took into my Mountain View home in the winter of 1990. Now find a dozen "Christians" in any one church who can claim to have individually done the same. Not paid for some homeless to live elsewhere, but brought the homeless into their lives and homes.]
So, I unplugged my laptop (the battery is good enough for the walk back to campus, but old, as the laptop of a homeless hobo should be, and not much good for the long haul of developing software), fished a scratch card from the Henry Madden Library (a very simpatico place to homeless) out of my pocket, wrote down in a dozen words the content of this current document, brought back in and handed it to "Paul" to ask him if he had any corrections to offer. He had quite a bit of trouble reading it, not a surprise, bigots are rarely well educated, and it was about then that he invited me into the back room to "show me something". Right. Bully tactics never change, hide from the light, then attack.
So, if you don't mind your kids playing with (and possibly catching and eating) the roaches, don't mind treating the veterans and homeless in our society as valueless outcasts, don't mind paying triple the going rate for washing clothes, by all means, patronize "Paul" and his Mammoth Laundromat, and give him a call at 559-221-9177 to tell him what a great job he did of telling that white-haired computer hacker where to go and how fast to get there. Otherwise, stay away and tell all your friends to do the same.