Packing Up for the DNC - Linen Packing, That is...

August 03, 2016 7:39 AM Comment(s) By Gabriel Mandujano

In case you haven't been following the news the last few weeks, the Democratic National Convention made its way to Philadelphia this Summer to nominate the next Democratic Candidate for the Presidency.  The city greeted the convention with open arms, including scattering 57 art-adorned fiberglass donkeys throughout Center City.  We decided to have some fun with the Pennsylvania donkey, which happened to reside right outside our office. More than 50,000 people made their way to the City of Brotherly Love to take part in the activities in some way, shape or form, and while Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Bernie Sanders, a cavalcade of guest speakers and thousands of delegates were getting all the glitz and glamour, there were thousands more working tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure a smooth and safe experience for all.  And guess what?  Wash Cycle Laundry was no exception! When so many extra people convene for any large event, people often forget that there's a lot of dirty laundry associated with all those guests.  We saw our fair share of sheets at two hotels we service, several out of town guests used our personal laundry services, but our biggest project was building kits for attendees who stayed at Temple University. Our staff at our North Philadelphia plant assembled almost 1,000 kits just for the DNC attendees alone, on top of their regular day-to-day workload.  We somehow found space to fit all of these into our tiny plant at the corner of Ridge & Thompson Streets.  It's a good thing we're not claustrophobic! We know we make it look easy, but these kits didn't just appear out of thin air.  The process required transporting additional linens from our other facilities, and of course, plenty of time spent putting them together.  With plenty of coffee fueling our staff, we formed an assembly line of blankets, sheets, towels, wash cloths, pillowcases and topped it off with a snazzy custom-designed bag.   We packed up to 50 kits in one hour, all by hand.  That's a LOT of folding and stuffing. After assembly, it was time to transport these to the Temple Campus, which is luckily only 1.5 miles from our plant.   Our cyclists could transport up to 60 kits at a time, so if you do the math, you'll see that's a lot of back-and-forth riding!  Not to mention that each bin weighs over 250 pounds... We'll admit that on one or two of the hottest days, we resorted to using a cargo van to save time (and possibly a cyclist from heat exhaustion), but most of the deliveries were done on the lovely cargo trike you see here. And of course, we eventually had to pick up all of the dirty linens and wash them, which was another adventure all it's own.  Have YOU ever tried to pick up, wash and fold 2,000 sheets in a day?  It's a lot of work!  Our friends at ZipCar helped us out with a van once again.  We love bikes, but sometimes we have to think of our cyclists' schedules too. We hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes at Wash Cycle Laundry, the first of many more.  So, now that the convention is over, you'd think we were finished and ready to relax, right?  WRONG!  We do laundry for special events all year round, including servicing several major universities throughout Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
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