The Laundry Nazi

Down deep in some dank minimum wage hole, lives an awful creature.  She stalks about during the day time, her attitude acidic, her voice abrasive.  Travel into her den, and be prepared to do battle. 

The Laundry Nazi, in her natural habitat

Step out of line just one time, and feel her wrath.

This is not some beast of mythical lore, no, this is the old woman who runs the day-to-day operations at my local laundromat.  She's a vile, evil, semi-human bitch of a woman, and she doesn't take shit off of no body.

The establishment itself is a dirty little building, a series of washers in the middle of the floor,  banks of dryers along the walls.  I'm pretty convinced that they recycle used washing machine water without any sort of filtration.  The people who congregate here are usually the lowest of the low: desperate shells of human beings, most with limps and lumps, scars and vacant stares.

But one amongst them all is the queen cunt.  The Laundry Nazi.

This woman, who plants herself in the far corner of the small one room laundromat, scans over her land from over the top of a free newspaper.  Her glasses are grimy, clothes stretched and threadbare, her teeth the color of the bottom of a urinal.  She has a very strict protocol for doing your laundry in her domain, and if you fail in any such way at all, you'll feel her burning hot meth-breath all over your neck.

Stories run far and wide, but I can only tell you about our first hand experiences:  A few summers ago, I was doing a load of wash.  I had been keeping an eye on the clock, knowing that, since she was on duty that day - and it was a busy day at the laundromat - I had to be Johnny-On-The-Spot changing out my load, or she would do it for me.  And you don't want that to happen.

In the back of the laundromat, there's a little closet filled with black plastic bags full of moldy, abandoned, misfit clothing that people had left in the washers for too long.  What's "too long?"  About a minute, according to the Laundry Nazi.

As I walked the thirty or so feet from the parking lot to the inside of the laundromat, I could already see her standing over my washers, black plastic bag in hand, lifting a washer's lid.  I sprinted, yanking the door wide open, and shouted out.

"Hey!  What're you doing?"  She reared her ugly, shovel-beaten face, snarled her day-glo yellow teeth.

"This washer has been off for 5 minutes!  We're very busy here today!"  She croaked like a toad with it's legs caught under a tire.  I glanced down at my watch and saw that maybe a minute had passed since I had started into the laundromat from outside.  I got between her and her bag and the washing machine.  She skulked away, snarling.  Her forked-tongue slipping out between her crusted over, crackpipe-burnt lips.

My wife would have similar experiences as well.  One time she loaded a washer without knowing the machine was out of order.  She placed detergent in it as well, and when she discovered the washer wasn't working, she had to face the Laundry Nazi to get a refund for the 2.50 in quarters she fed the machine.

"She was so rude!  I almost told her to forget it; it was worth the 2.50 to not have to deal with her," explained my wife, days later.  In sum, the Laundry Nazi gave her an inordinate amount of grief for putting detergent and clothes into a malfunctioning washing machine.  My wife tried to explain to the despot that there was no signage to indicate there was a problem, but the Laundry Nazi pulled out a scimitar and started waving it around like crazy.  It was all my wife could do to get out of there alive.

She has since decided to do her laundry late at night, since the facility is open 24 hours a day.

Scholars believe this is the first known image of the Laundry Nazi

Most recently, again, I was doing laundry, when the machine wouldn't take a quarter I was trying to insert into it.  I checked the coin to make sure it wasn't Canadian, and it was good ol' fashion American currency.  I gave the coin bank a little shot with my palm to rattle it just so, and apparently this was enough to spark the ire of The Laundry Nazi.

Like an evil genie, she materialized next to me, the smell of pure sulfur announcing her arrival. 

"Is there a problem here?"  She hissed.  My skin went cold and rippled with goosebumps.

"The machine won't take my change..." I was barely able to indicate, as I could feel the life being sucked out of me.  She admonished me for "beating on the machine" and then shoved me aside.

She then began to wallop the washer while howling at the tops of her lungs like some sort of she-wolf in heat.  She snarled and kicked and slashed with her hawk talon-like hands.  The local residents cowered, taking cover behind industrial grade trash barrels and giant dust bunnies that have been a part of the landscape since the 1980s.

She then turned to me, as the tiny "clink" of my change being finally accepted by the washer sounded.  "In the future," she starts, "don't hit the machines..." the last word rings in my ears like Parseltongue.  She walks away, back to her perch and free newspaper.  Her grease-slicked glasses lamping over the establishment, silently keeping order.