When you are in the laundromat there often isn’t a lot to do, so some people like to strike up a conversation with others who are there.

What would you do if you went to ask a question of another person and they got upset and even threatened to call the police?

That is what happened to the man in this story, and he is trying to figure out if he did something wrong.

Check it out and see what you think.

AITA? Woman threatens to call police on me for asking questions in the laundry room

So I live in Finland at a student apartment complex.

I had done some laundry the day before, and was going to pick them up from the drying room.

There was this older woman doing her laundry.

That is a weird setup.

What caught my eye was that she had a green water hose going from the laundry room’s separate water tap into the laundry machine’s hatch/hole where you put the detergents.

I had not seen that kind of water hose setup before, so I was curious.

I asked about it, and if the water pipes that normally supply the water to the machine had gone dry.

She said in pretty good Finnish that she didn’t understand the question.

I presume she didn’t know the word for water hose (vesiletku), so I repeated the question, this time pointing to the hose and pipes.

She asked if I spoke any Russian.

I didn’t, but I had access to Google Translate.

As I was writing, she told me to “stop bullying her,” which I first took as humorous banter between neighbors.

At this point I would just avoid talking to her.

I showed her the translation, but she refused to look at it, again repeating that I should stop bullying her, and that I should back off.

Confused, I asked what she meant, but she took her own phone, began filming me, and said that if I would not stop “bullying” her she would send the video to the police (!?).

As she refused to even listen to my explanations, I stopped trying.

I still had my dry laundry in the adjacent drying room, so what followed was kind of awkward 5 minutes as I folded my clothes up and she kept sitting on the laundry room bench.

That does seem excessive.

The threat to call the cops on me seemed very uncalled for, so I wanted to try one more time to set the record straight.

So I wrote a little “sorry about that, I was just curious about the hose” paragraph to explain and de-escalate the situation.

She again refused to look at my phone, and said very rudely that she didn’t want to talk to me nor see me.

Language barriers can be difficult.

All our communication was in Finnish, as she refused to look at my attempted Russian translations.

Idk if I did anything wrong, but here are my theories to what might have gone wrong on my part:

• She said that she had reserved the laundry room, and took my presence as barging in. (However, the reservations are for the laundry machines, and I was picking up my dried up laundry. I had every right to be there)
• She took my (20-ish male) casual talking to her (35-45 yr woman) as some sort of sexual harassment?
• She took my male presence as threatening? When I brought my phone closer to her face that she could read the translations, that’s when she told me to back off. However, I was keeping the polite-distance-with-strangers the whole time.
• Russo-Finnish mistranslation? Although she spoke Finnish very well, she clearly didn’t know some words.
• Cultural difference in something?

I had acted calm and casual (though increasingly confused) during the whole situation, but thought it was both very unwarranted and rude by the woman to begin filming me and threatening to call the cops on me.

I don’t see what he might have missed.

But maybe I missed something in the situation?

AITA?

It sounds like she just wanted to be left alone, but she overreacted.

Let’s see if the people in the comments have anything to say.

This person recommends not pressuring someone into a conversation.

Here is someone who says she could have flooded the area.

This person thinks the woman was worried about getting in trouble.

This commenter recommends reporting it to building maintenance.

This person thinks it is strange.

This lady really seemed to overreact.

There definitely seems to be something missing from the story.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.