Does anyone carry cash anymore? I hardly ever have a few bills on me, except when I go to Chuck’s Café and have to pay the ridiculous seven-days-a-week cover charge. Everything nowadays is done via credit card and cash just isn’t as necessary, which makes change virtually useless.

This makes doing laundry a herculean task for me. The laundry machines in my apartment building still only take quarters, and finding enough quarters to do laundry is harder than finding Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

Really though, why are we still dealing with coin-operated washers and dryers? In the blink of an eye, it’s possible to look up pictures on my computer taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a billion miles away, but I can’t use a credit card to run a Maytag?

Beyond that, my landlords charge $1.50 for a wash and 25 cents per 10 minutes in a dryer. So basically, it has gotten to the point where I’m carrying a sack of coins along with my sack of clothes down to the laundry room. It is, quite simply, ridiculous.

Nobody uses coins anymore. Not even parking meters in Syracuse — those also take plastic now. Apparently, I could probably pay for most things using my phone if I wanted to, though I’m technologically impaired and have no idea how I would go about doing that.

I bet teaching myself how to use Google Wallet would be a heck of a lot easier than finding enough quarters to pay for some loads of laundry. They’re out there, somewhere in the world – between couch cushions, under the fridge and in the cup holder of my car.

But it takes 45 minutes to assemble them all together and then, inevitably, I’m 25 cents short.

Basically, for me, being 21 is mostly an endless quest to find quarters. And it’s a difficult quest: gas stations never want to give you change and give you dirty looks when they relent. Change machines only exist in video game arcades, and since video game arcades don’t exist anymore, that’s out.

I never thought I would find myself longing for the halcyon days of residence hall laundry rooms, but man, that was the one thing you got right, Syracuse. Paying for washing and drying via SUpercard Plus is genius. You swipe your credit card, punch in the number for your respective machine, and boom – the machine starts. No more quarters jangling around in my pocket, falling out everywhere, getting lost.

Now that I’ve moved off campus, however, I’m trapped in the hellish crusade to gather quarters that seem to scatter like startled sheep, no matter what I do. So please, society, let’s move into the 21st century. Let’s remember that we’re a species that has landed on the Moon, split the atom and apparently curing AIDS. Let’s end the coin-operated laundry thing. It’s silly.

And who knows? With this technological update, maybe we can take all the change we’re not using and put it toward ending that sequestration thing – and I can stop pretending to know what that word means.

Kevin Slack is a senior television, radio and film major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at khslack@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @kevinhslack.

Published on March 5, 2013 at 1:15 am