Doing laundry at my apartment complex is always an adventure. Between the Nerd Cowboy and the guy who likes to widdle into a garbage can, there’s always an interesting character or two in there.
I entered the other day to find an old man standing towards the back of the room putting clothes into a washer. I thought nothing of him. I’d never seen him before, but other than that there wasn’t anything of note about him (besides the brown socks pulled all the way up out of his brown fuzzy slippers).
Right as I began to fill a washer with dirty clothes… he spoke. He spoke with a heavy accent that I can only guess as being Eastern European. He asked me if I lived “here”. I said I did. He asked if I lived in the apartment complex. I said I lived in the same building we were both doing our laundry in. He said ok and returned to his clothes. I did the same.
A minute or two later he looked at me and said “I didn’t mean to offend you with my questions”. Where did he get the idea I was offended? Maybe it was because I’d been brief and unengaging in our first conversation. Who knows. But I assured him I was not offended. I thought that’d be the end of it. But no… it wasn’t.
He proceeded to tell me that he had been “chosen” by the apartment management to “guard” the laundry room from people who did not live in the complex. He said some “bitch” came in a couple of days ago talking on a cell phone and doing laundry. Keep in mind that this guy is old… at least in his 60s… and heavily accented. He continued to tell me that, when he’d questioned whether or not she lived there, she gave him attitude. I chuckled… mostly because I could hardly understand a word he was saying. Then he tells me… and I quote… “I called her a f’ing c*** and told her to get her ass out of my laundry room”. You know what ‘c’ word I’m referring to, right? Think about it. And he didn’t say ‘f’ing’. He said the whole word. Yeah… he actually said that to me… a stranger. Haha. Next I find out about a “fat… no… not fat… f’ing huge” man who brings his son with him and uses all of the washing machines every Sunday.
Apparently he sits in his apartment and watches out his door for people that he doesn’t recognize entering the laundry room. When he sees someone who doesn’t look familiar… they get questioned. If they live there… he leaves him alone. If they don’t, he chases them off with foul words like c***.
As I was leaving the laundry room after my first encounter with the Tide Nazi I ran into some woman. She saw the old man in the laundry room and looked at me… rolled her eyes… and said, and again I quote… “he’s f’ing insane”. And no… she didn’t say ‘f’ing’ either. She said the whole word. Yes. There seems to be a lot of foul-mouthed people living in this complex. I guess I fit right in.
When I went to put my clothes over in the dryer later, he was still in there. He asked me if i was good ‘housekeeper’. I told him I guessed I was. Then he asked me if I was married. Hahahahahaha. He obviously doesn’t read my blog. When I told him I wasn’t, he decided to impart a little marriage advice on me. He told me that when I did get married, I should keep the fact that I was a good housekeeper a secret from my wife. When I asked him why, he told me that it was because, if my wife found out, she would expect too much from me and would never life a finger around the house herself. Women are lazy, he told me. All they do is sit around and watch TV… they don’t work around the house like they’re supposed to anymore. He told me they’ve watched so much TV that they’re not able to cook and clean and do womanly things anymore. “Lazy bitches… all of them”.
I pretended to have a call on my cell phone to get out the laundry room and back into my apartment.
