laundry rage

I had assumed it was an isolated incident the first time it happened.

In my building, there lives an old lady. Every now and then I would see her in the elevator. She always walked with a walker, and her walker had a basket, and inside the basket sat her 14-year-old blind-in-one-eye poodle-terrier mutt. Both the lady and the mutt have dirty gray hair. Both seemed frail. Both were pitiful.

Whenever I saw them, because of the guilt I felt for feeling sorry for them, I tried extra hard to be friendly, as if through the power of pleasantry they would grow strong and young and healthy again.

That is until one day I met them in the laundry room. I smiled and nodded and went to load my dirty wash into a machine. A few minutes later, behind me, I heard the most angry, bitter, savage vitriol.

"Fucking fuckers. Fuck! Filthy shit. Bastards. Disgusting, filthy shit. Fucking bastards." And on and on it went. She was flipping open the lids of the laundry machines, examining them, and becoming furious. Apparently, the laundry machines were dirty. Though I'm not sure how that could be. I left and stopped feeling sorry for her.

Then today, I was folding freshly dried clothes and a middle-aged woman wearing baggy pajamas and frown-wrinkles started to ram the driers with her laundry card. The card wasn't working and she was muttering hateful curses that made me uneasy.

I began to wonder if there was such a thing as laundry rage, or if the two women were simply miserable and if I should start feeling sorry for them again or if one day I would become like them and how I could prevent that.