Leave the washer or dryer open for a minute and suddenly there's a feline sitting inside, looking perfectly pleased with their new accommodations. It's dark, enclosed, and just the right size for curling up. Basically, everything a cat looks for in prime real estate. The fact that hoomans occasionally need to put clothes in there is apparently not their concern.
Then there's the ultimate feline luxury: laundry fresh out of the dryer.
Nothing attracts a cat quite like a warm pile of clean clothes. You can have three expensive cat beds scattered around the house, but the second those freshly dried towels hit the couch, someone is making a beeline for them. Within minutes, the pile has a cat-shaped dent in the middle and your plans to fold everything have been postponed indefinitely.
We can't really blame them. If someone regularly delivered a mountain of warm blankets directly to us, we'd probably climb in too. Cats simply have the confidence to assume every cozy thing that enters the house was purchased specifically for them.
Of course, freshly washed laundry comes with one major flaw: it doesn't have enough cat hair on it yet. Luckily, your feline is happy to handle quality control. One nap later, everything has been properly re-furred and is ready to return to the closet.
Cat pawrents quickly learn to inspect machines before starting them and accept that warm laundry may never make it to the folding stage without feline interference. Laundry day isn't really laundry day until somebody has claimed the basket, occupied the dryer, or fallen asleep on the clean towels.
The spin cycle may belong to the clothes, but the fluff cycle belongs to the cat.