Three machines on a card system where every card belongs to a flat and every pound is reconciled monthly. Machine three runs one cycle a week on a card the system has no record of issuing, and the money is really there.
I am the treasurer of the residents management company for a block of thirty eight flats. We own our own freehold, we employ our own cleaner and we run our own laundry, which means I am the person who reconciles it.
The laundry is in the basement: three washers, two dryers, and a card reader on each.
The cards are the part that matters. They are contactless, issued by us, one per flat, registered to the flat number in the system. You top up at a kiosk by the door with a debit card, which puts credit on the laundry card and takes real money into our account.
Every transaction is logged: card number, flat, machine, cycle type, amount, timestamp. The logs come off a little server in the cupboard and I pull them monthly, because the laundry income has to reconcile to the bank, and because residents ask.
Thirty eight cards issued. Thirty four active. Four flats have never collected one.
Machine three runs a cycle every Tuesday, between 21:10 and 21:40, paid for on a card whose number is not in the issued list.
One cycle. A forty degree cotton wash, which is the second of the four buttons. Two pounds twenty.
It has done this since the system was installed in 2019.
The card number is the thing I have been round in circles on for six years.
Every card has a number printed on it and held in the chip, and the system's issued list has all thirty eight. The card in these transactions has a number of the correct length and format for our system, and it is not one of the thirty eight, and it has never been one of the thirty eight.
The supplier's engineer came out in 2020 and took the log away and came back with the answer that the card was not in our database and must therefore be a card from another installation, which happens, because the numbering is per supplier rather than per site.
That is a real answer. A cleaner who works at two blocks could easily bring the wrong card.
It does not survive the credit. A card from another site has no credit on OUR system, and a card with no credit does not start a machine. The machine checks the balance against our server before it unlocks.
And the balance is the part I cannot put anywhere.
On our system the card has a balance, and the balance goes down by two pounds twenty every Tuesday, and when it gets low it is topped up.
The top ups are in the log and they are in the bank.
Twenty pounds at a time, by debit card, at the kiosk, about every nine weeks. I have the merchant statements. The money arrives in the residents management company's account and it is real money that pays for real electricity and real water, and in six years it comes to about six hundred and eighty pounds.
The kiosk takes a debit card and records the last four digits and the card scheme. Same last four digits every time, for six years, which is longer than most debit cards last.
What I have done, in order.
Blocked the card. The system has a block function and I used it in 2021. A blocked card is refused at the machine and the refusal is logged.
Machine three ran a forty degree cotton wash the following Tuesday. The log shows the card as blocked, the transaction as completed, and the balance reduced.
I have shown that pair of lines to the supplier's technical manager on a video call and he went quiet and then said he would need to escalate it, and the escalation came back as unable to reproduce.
Replaced the reader on machine three. Then replaced machine three, in 2022, because it was eleven years old and due. New machine, new reader, new cable.
Tuesdays, 21:10 to 21:40, forty degree cotton.
The room.
There is no camera in the laundry and there never will be, because it is a room where people handle their underwear and the first resident who suggested it was talked out of it in about nine seconds.
There is a camera on the basement corridor outside it, for the bike store.
I have pulled that footage for eleven Tuesdays over the years.
Nobody goes in. Nobody comes out. The door is on a spring closer and it is visible in the frame and it does not open.
The washing.
I have been down at half nine on a Tuesday perhaps twenty times.
Machine three is running. The drum is turning, the window is wet, you can hear it, and it is warm to the hand on the top panel, which a machine pretending to run would not be.
There is washing in it. You can see it through the glass, going round. Pale colours, sheets or towels, the sort of load anybody would put on.
I have waited for it to finish four times. The cycle ends, the door unlocks, and the machine is empty.
Not damp-empty, which is what you would expect. Dry. The drum is dry and the seal is dry and the filter is dry, and I have put my arm in up to the shoulder and felt round the back of the drum, and there is nothing and it is dry.
The fifth time I opened the door mid cycle, which you can do in an emergency with the override key we hold as the management company, and which drains the machine first and takes about forty seconds.
It drained. Forty seconds of water into the floor gully, which I heard and saw. The door unlocked.
Empty. Dry.
What I do with it is an accounting decision and it is the only part of this I am confident about.
The two pounds twenty a week is income. It is in the laundry income line, it reconciles to the bank, and the annual accounts are right and have been signed off by our accountant six times.
Nobody has ever queried it, because the laundry makes about eleven hundred pounds a year and nobody reads the laundry line.
What I have done that is not an accounting decision is that I stopped using machine three myself in 2021, and I have never said why to anybody, and over the years I have noticed that the other two are always the ones with the queue.
I have never once had to wait for machine three. In six years. In a building of thirty eight flats.