"They’re screwing up your life, and they don’t mind that you’re sitting right there"

And here, in the drab basements of Capitol Hill, the threat of a government shutdown looks different: scarier, closer, more mean-spirited. For these workers, what stings is not just the threat of having their wages cut off. It is who’s making the threat: the very legislators that drink the coffee they brew and ride the elevators they operate.

“Do you notice that I’m here?” Matthew Moses, a Maryland resident who moves furniture, wonders when he passes lawmakers in the hall. With tattoos poking out from under his blue work shirt, Moses said he’s worried that his bills would back up during a shutdown…

“I mean, we’re just a little peon, that’s all,” said Quattrone, an Italian immigrant who has cut hair on the Hill for 41 years. He still has hope: When they’re in his chair, congressmen tell him they’re working to avoid a shutdown. “I haven’t talked to anybody who says, ‘I want this place to shut down,’ ” Quattrone said…

“I wish they had some type of sympathy,” said a woman working at a dry-cleaning counter who declined to give her name. She said some congressional staff members, in to drop off or pick up, told her she should have made a plan to last through a shutdown.