Adventures in Laundry

Laundry-- who knew it could be such an ordeal? After accidentally washing a load on the table linens setting, because you can't change the settings after you've pressed the start button, and some frustration due to the fact that the washing machine informed me that my clothes would be washing for 58 minutes, I finally got some clean clothes. But, no. They still needed to dry. I was trying to read the long instructions (17 steps, no joke) on top of the dryer when another guy came in. We quickly started chatting in English: he's from Venezuela, in Berlin for one month now, studying German. He could understand even less of the drying instructions than I could. After 15 minutes or so of standing around, slamming doors, sticking our laundry cards in the machines and randomly pressing buttons, we both gave up. I just decided to dry my stuff in my room. So last night and this morning, there was laundry hanging off of everywhere possible. Every hanger was taken up. There was practically no space in my tiny bathroom due to the fact that so much was hanging on the shower curtain rod. I don't know what I'm going to do next time. I do know, though, that I will leave much more time to figure it out; last night, Venezuela and I were pushing the time limits of the laundry room. Which brings me to my next question: why does a laundry room have a closing time?