In my 14 years here

I was headed to work on Sunday and I got into the elevator and heard someone down the hall open their door and start heading towards me, so I decided to do the gentlemanly thing and hit the Door Open button. A guy got in with his dog.

The dog was an atypical dog for this area of Manhattan, in that I could not have stolen it by slipping it into my front pocket (also the dude could have murdered me with his bare hands, but that's beside the point). It was about knee high with very short brown fur, and I imagine that if it barked at you, you'd be a little intimidated. But it was quiet and calm in the elevator.

We stopped at the seventh floor and a woman took a step towards the elevator, saw the dog and stepped back. She didn't say anything and didn't get in.

"Are you afraid of dogs?" the guy asked, presumably because there was room in the elevator and he wanted to make sure that he didn't hit "Door Close" if she still wanted to get in, or if she didn't realize that there was room for her.

"That dog," she stuttered. Fair enough; she's afraid of large dogs. And then, "that dog is not supposed to be in an elevator."

Both of us in the elevator were puzzled. How was one supposed to get a dog our of the building? Take him down the stairs from the fifteenth floor? Was there some kind of secret dog-evator that neither of us knew about? So the guy said, "what?"

Now the woman seized on the guy's confusion, I guess, and built up a head of steam. "You're not supposed to have dogs like that in the building. In my fourteen years here, I have never seen a dog like that in the elevator." Which is weird, because I've been in this building for a little over four months and I've seen plenty of dogs that size in the elevator.

The guy was just as confused as I was by this woman's baffling hostility and inability to admit that being afraid of dogs was her problem, not the guy's for breaking some building rule that didn't exist, so the guy responded the only way he could have, I guess. "You're fucking retarded."

I couldn't see the woman's face at this point, because I was in the back corner of the elevator--which is a real shame. What I heard was the woman gasp (!) and take several steps backward. She hit the down button again as the door was closing so it opened again and I thought there was going to be a confrontation or she wasn't going to let us go, but then I heard a couple of steps down the hallway and a door opening and closing, so I guess she went back into her apartment.

The two of us headed down. "That woman was a stupid bitch," he said.

"Heh."

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The moral as always: swearing is hilarious.