So, today we drove out to Umatilla to have the baby’s hip checked. While on the table at the ultrasound room, she pooped all over the sheets. As the ultrasound tech put the dirty laundry in the laundry heap, I made the blindingly obvious observation, “This place must have to do a lot of dirty laundry.”
She replied that most ultrasounds are not on live, poopy babies, but that they do have to clean the sheets in between visitors time. She commented that they do it in-house.
“Isn’t that always the case?” I asked. I mean, I would have to think that it would be in the interest of just about every such clinic to have some monster washing machines. She said that no, actually, most places have cleaning services. She then said that when she was an ultrasound tech in Austin, they actually hired a cleaning service that trucked it to San Antonio.
Clancy is, for reasons I will not get into at the moment, ineligible for life insurance. So with my career on hold, if something happens to her, I really don’t know what I’ll do. Not to get too serious in an otherwise light-hearted post, but there is a disconcerting vulnerability there.
Well, I thought I had found my solution. If something happens to Clancy, Lain and I would move to Austin where I am going to start a laundry service for hospitals and clinics that doesn’t require trucking clothes to San Antonio to be cleaned. There is apparently a need.
But wait, somebody is already doing that. So why in the world would a clinic in Austin be shipping laundry to San Antonio? Curses, foiled again.
During the California Gold Rush, some laundry was supposedly sent to Honolulu and Canton. In that context, Austin to San Antonio doesn’t seem that far.
“Zeb, how do you write ‘Less starch in the collars’ in Chinese?”
Maybe they suck.
Maybe the hospital administrator’s husband has a sister that owns the laundry in Austin and she was talked into giving the hospital’s business to the laundry in San Antonio one night at a family dinner that was really set up to ambush her. She felt so guilty, and they were going to cut the hospital such a good deal that it was going to cost relatively the same. So she agreed and now spends he days watching the laundry trucks come and go from the comfort of her office while trying not to think of the environmental impact of her decision to let people drive the laundry all around the great state of Texas when she passing the local laundry on her way home every night.
So I have a google alert set up for Austin Laundry, and this post pops up! We do commercial laundry (as well as residential), and have found that most medical places do theirs in-house because it is expensive to outsource. We are familiar with The Laundry Room, but have a different business model; being Eco-friendly for starters.
San Antonio has some good opportunities for federal contracts, if you can stomach the bureaucracy.
Greetings, Louise. The best to you and your business.
The “in-house” I understand. That’s what I figured most places did because if you have a hospital, you probably generate enough laundry to make it worthwhile. It’s the sending it an hour or two (?) south that I couldn’t (can’t) figure out.