Valium Anyone?

I can honestly say I've never yelled at a stranger. Never. No; I save my angriest comments and nastiest behaviour for those I love. My kids, mostly. (My husband knows when to keep his head down.)

But yesterday I was at the gym, stretching after a weight class, and like most of the class, trying to do a self-congratulatory pat on the back for working out, while trying to ease our muscles back into shape to face the rest of the day.

As per usual, a few of the ladies were chatting during this longed for cool-down, when a woman at the front of the class whipped around and said in a Linda Blair scary kind of way "Excuse me but this is MY class too. STOP talking!"

Whoa.

It's not the first time I've seen this happen. Someone goes verbally postal at the slightest provocation. As a colleague of mine who suffers from this says, "I'm just a bad mood waiting to happen."

As she stormed out of the class at the end (with all of us jumping out of her way as she slammed her weights back on the shelf) she said "I guess I'm just going to be known as the b*tch in the class now."

Um sweetie I think, given this display, you're probably known as the b*tch in a few other places as well.

So, just a warning, you never know what someone else is dealing with when they lose it this way. I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume something actually bad had happened to her earlier that day.

If not, save it for the kids like I do, okay? Chances are, they've actually done something to deserve it. You just don't know about it yet.