I recently changed laundromats, and I find myself fascinated with the personality each one holds.

The character of the old one spurs descriptors such as “ghetto” and “prole.” Tiles line the floor – in a muted shade of 1973. I once heard two women there talking about a mutual acquaintance as a “rat-trap ho.”

The manager there enjoys a Fonzie-style relationship with the machines: It is common for him to offer a little jab to greedy washers whose doors refuse to open. When not reuniting wet clothes and their owners, he walks around with a cigarette dangling from his mouth (despite the emphatic sign: Please no smoking in front of driers thank you mgmt). He talks with his favorite patrons, casually slinging platitudes in his thread-bare tank top.

It sounds awful, but I patronized that laundromat, in its chunky brown strip mall with a labor-ready work-by-the-hour office and and a foam cushion outlet, for 18 months.

Halfway across town, the new-to-me laundromat survives on an anemic crew. Two of every three washers and driers bear “out of order” signs, insistently written in Sharpie and taped to their Plexiglas faces. Even the change and soda machines have notes introducing themselves: For patrons only; Please do not put taped bills in machine – thanx mgmt; Please do not put dimes or nickels in soda machine it jams thank you; Quarters only.

The TV, mounted in an upper corner of the room, bears the verboten warning “DO-NOT-CHANGE-TV.” On it, a cavalcade of John Wayne movies and Mr. Ed episodes wanly offers background entertainment.

This one sits almost invisibly in a low-lying strip of stores. I drove past it dozens of times before the sign jumped into my attention.

The old woman who manages the new one has the charm of Mussolini. On my first trip there, I held up a $10 bill for her and asked for change. “Where’s your laundry?” Apparently burned by the rash of ungrates who get change and go elsewhere with the cloths, she made me bring in my laundry from the car before she pointed me to the change machine I hadn’t seen tucked away in a corner.

The contrast is startling – to me anyway. Laundromats are not exclusively American. Still, I’m amused at the shades of America found in them.