South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
STRESSED OUT?
Destroy TV's and blenders with a sledgehammer at Miami ‘rage room’
Remember that scene in Mike Judge’s comedy “Office Space” where three baseball cubicle bat? dwellers take a printer out to a field and wreck it with a
Kathy Barrios felt that way about her Amazon Kindle. Books wouldn’t load. Nothing would download. So last month, she set the tablet on a table at Smash the Rage in Doral and whacked it with a hammer until she felt satisfied.
“It was OK. I backed up the data first,” Barrios says. “But after I hit it, I got that frustration out immediately.”
Barrios is the co-owner of Smash the Rage, part of a trend of so-called
“rage rooms” that have popped up in
New York and elsewhere. Paying customers show up to wail on bedside lamps, destroy computers and bludgeon toasters. She opened Smash the
Rage in early September with Massiel
Reyes, a close friend.
Billed on its website as a way to “smash away that repressed anger, one item at a time,” Smash the Rage offers a menu of weapons — sledgehammers, shovels, furniture legs, even a sturdy pancake-maker — to demolish beer bottles, old TVs and tables.
“It’s a safe environment for customers to come in and release some of their anger and resentment that they couldn’t at work or home,” says Barrios, adding that visitors have told her it’s more therapeutic “than a psychologist.” “So many things in South Florida can provoke your anger, especially if you’re stuck on I-95 or the Palmetto.”
Barrios, by day a humanresources office worker, says she discovered the rage room concept while poking around Facebook late last year. She found recently opened rage rooms in New York (the Wrecking Club) and Dallas (Anger Room) but none in South Florida. As with ax-throwing bars, yet another date-night activity paired with weapons, more rage rooms have started cropping up in Florida after debuting in bigger cities.
Customers must book room reservations online (no walk-ins allowed) and sign an online waiver before wielding a weapon, Barrios says.
Flying shrapnel is a given, so visitors wear protective coveralls, a clear face mask and gloves.
Sessions range in price from $35 for a solo “rager,” which includes a weapon and a 15-item box of random objects, to $100 themed rooms filled with office supplies, no doubt for people to play out their own “Office Space” fantasies.
There’s another good reason for the office breakables, Barrios says. When she asks customers what brought them to Smash the Rage, the answers are always the same.
“It’s work. It’s always their bosses at work. They just blast some System of a Down and start breaking stuff,” Barrios says. “I think we’re providing a good service here. It’s a different way of coping, and it’s a workout.”
Now, go take it out on that old Ikea dresser.