With due recognition to Malacandra for giving me the idea, what’s the most galling way in which you’ve learned what others really think about you en passant, as it were? In other words, not when you’re having a heart to heart, or a ding-dong, but something that hits you like a bolt from the blue when you least expect it. I’m getting goosebumps just writing this, as the anticipation of sharing these moments with my Internet family grows.
First, at school, aged 17, a Christian for some years, and a good all-round public school boy. I’m in the nearside back passenger seat of my Dad’s car at the end of the school year in 1976, saying goodbye to an 19 year old, who stayed on an extra year to take an extra A level, which meant us being in the same class. (It was Ancient History - a doddle.) He was also a top rugby player, second head of school (well, you would be, staying on that long), and, with my brother, the leading Christian in the school, having become one three years previously.
So, my brother and he say their farewells and Nick comes round to my side. I say, “Bye, Nick, I’ve learned a lot from you”. He smiles that crooked smile of his, and then says: “And I’ve learned a lot from you - in a funny sort of way.”
I’ll share the second one (spoken by a knockout Chinese lawyer/concert-level pianist, who I briefly went out with before getting a bit too frisky) after you’ve shared yours.
I’m unseen, reading in a seldom-used chair around the corner, as a kid.
Little Sister: Why do I have to have AHunter3 for a brother? All the other kids tease me about him because he’s weird, and don’t say that’s just kids being mean, he is weird.
Parents: It’s not his fault / he’s still your brother / yes we know / it just is.
Oh, there was the time that a girl I was sitting next to on an Amtrak train wrote in a letter to a friend that I was “ugly as hell.” (She left the letter sitting out in the open on the tray table; I think she wanted me to read that bit so I’d stop chatting with her. )
Back in December 1999 I went to an F2F of an online community (not the Dope.) I had a great time and thought everybody there liked me.
I thought I was finally making friends; until that time I had been pretty much a complete loner.
Three years later, in another online forum, I read
and someone else who wasn’t even there, but had seen my photo, wrote
No wonder there were no more local F2Fs and everybody was “too busy” to do anything with me.
After that I figured, well, you know, screw it. I’ll never be able to tell whether anyone really likes me or whether they’re just being polite and waiting for me to go away. So I threw in the towel on the whole wanting-companionship thing. If everyone I meet thinks I’m a creep, I’ll just do stuff by myself until I die of frigging old age. Who the hell needs anyone??
I once read my employer’s file on me, with permission. She had called all my references when she hired me, and she wanted to let me check out what people had said about me so that I could use them/not use them as references when getting another job. It turns out that one of my previous references gave me a horrible, scathing review.
“Alice” hadn’t been my supervisor, but my supervisor (who was on my referene list and got the call) had passed on Alice’s name as “someone else I worked with in the department.” I had been a student worker and had spent most of my time at this job stuffing envelopes, so I had only been a generic office drone, but Alice acted as if being a bitch got her karma points somewhere. Alice told my prospective employer that “she would never hire me,” that I was “flaky and irresponsible,” that “I seeemed like I had other issues,” etc.
She almost ruined my prospects of getting a job right out of college, even knowing that I hadn’t listed her specifically as a reference. I barely even knew her!!
People can be very cruel. I came to HK to work as a voluntary worker with a Christian drug rehabilitation group. When things didn’t work out after 5 months (the drug addicts liked me, but my colleagues weren’t so keen), I spent 10 days with an Australian family who had connections with the society I had been working with. After a day or two, a friend of the family arrived and we shared a room for four or five days. It turned out that he had helped one of the daughters out in a major way (accommodation etc) when she went back to Australia from HK for her schooling. He was a nice guy, and we got on well.
After he’d left, the same girl he’d helped out (she must have been in her early 20s at that time) had nothing good to say of him and called him a sleezebag, or some such thing, citing the most minor and ridiculous things. I held my own counsel, but it made me reflect on the injustice of life if it was her estimation of the man that gained a wide currency, and affected the way other women looked at him.
I haven’t learned anything in this manner (that I can recall - I suppose I could be suppressing some incident or other). I just popped in to say that Neidhart’s post broke my heart. I feel very sad now, and convinced anew that people are horrible,
At district orchestra my junior year, I bombed my reaudition because I was terribly sick. Because of the way flutists are, they had all crowded around the door to listen to me play badly. I had already been last chair, so I didn’t have anywhere to move, but I was embarrassed. And sick.
In the middle of the morning we had a break, and we were standing around eating cookies. I was by myself behind a pillar and I heard one of the other flutes telling one of the people who had been scoring reauditions “…but I did way better than my stand partner,” which the judge person agreed with. I came out from behind the pillar and said, “Yeah, I know, I was terrible” and watched their mouths drop open.
I ended up having to go home after lunch on the first day because I was so sick. I wonder if they spent the rest of the weekend talking about how crap I played or if they didn’t because they were worried I’d pop out from behind a pillar again.
This happened rather recently, and I was more distressed about it than I would have thought.
We had a big restructuring at work, and a new person was hired who is now my boss. We get along well. He always seemed very pleased with my work.
We chit-chatting before a meeting, speculating on how old someone was and someone guessed an age, and I said “Oh no, he must be older than that, because I went to high school with his son and his son was two years ahead of me, which means that his son is (this old) so the guy has to be at least (this old).” So, essentially saying how old I was.
Well, my boss almost fell off his chair, and said he thought I was much younger. I tried to pass this off like a compliment, which could work. But yet, he keep digging himself in deeper. The point, it seems, is that my kind-of-at-the-higher-end of middle management job is impressive for a young person, because you think “Wow, she must have moved up very quickly” but for an older person, you think “Huh, I wonder why she’s been stuck in that job without promotion.” So in about 30 seconds I went from being a young rising professional to someone stuck in a dead end job.
You could tell he sort of felt bad while he was saying it (in front of a bunch of my colleagues, no less), but it was like he was so amazed he couldn’t stop himself.
Neidhart: If I lived a bit closer I would buy you a beer. I know exactly how it feels to get snubbed. People are stupid, and tend to push away the more interesting people.
People who say this shit kinda piss me off. No way you’re so ugly that you’ll be alone forever. Trust me, I’ve seen some damn ugly people get married/girlfriends/laid.
I started what I thought was a good job a couple of years ago. It was a internet startup. This place turned out to be spooky real fast. They didn’t want people talking to one another. I don’t mean they didn’t want coworkers to engage in idle chit-chat, I mean they didn’t want you talking to people about work or asking for any kind of help. I got reprimanded twice in my first two weeks for asking 5 minute questions to other employess that were the only ones that could give me the information (things like passwords and program paths). These were things that were proprietary to the company and you couldn’t possibly know it until someone explained it to you.
I tried not to speak to anyone and just learn things on my own. I was doing Ok when, at week six, I was in the middle of something and my boss pulled me into a conference room. He said that things weren’t working out and I was terminated effective immediately. I asked why and he wouldn’t tell me. I just repeated and repeated the question and refused to move until he told me. He finally said, “We just don’t like you and you don’t fit in here”. I pressed for more detail and he started listing individual people and why they didn’t like me. The reasons were completely assinine like not including an extended thank you in an e-mail to someone and being disrespectful by allowing the free popcorn in the kitchen to burn.
When I first started college, I became very depressed, and had sort of a nervous breakdown. A few months later, I was at my best friend’s house, and she was checking her e-mail. She asked me to see if she had gotten e-mail from this guy she knew online, and I checked it. Since we both talked to him, she didn’t mind if I opened it (we used to read our e-mail together…or so I thought).
In the e-mail he said, “Gee, I’m sorry to hear that Kathi isn’t ‘quite all there,’ heh.” Basically, she had been telling this guy all about my breakdown and how I was seeing a psychiatrist and how I had just been diagnosed OCD. I completely tore her a new one and went home in tears. Both she AND her mother thought I was overreacting. “It’s not something to be ashamed of!” her mother said. Bullshit, that wasn’t the point.
When I was in highschool, I had a co-op job at an art gallery with another girl. This girl was an awful snob, and rarely talked to me. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t like me - I’m really uncomfortable with conflict, especially working in it, so I went out of my way to be nice to her; small talk, little compliments, etc. One day I was on the bus to go home, sitting way at the back, and she got on with another girl, and sat in the middle. She didn’t see me when she got on. She started talking to her friend about her day, and I was in my own little world, just looking out the window. But then my ears perked up when I heard her say to her friend: “So, I work with this other girl, her name is AFG.”
Her friend says, “Oh yeah?”
She replies, “Yeah, she’s really stupid…I make fun of her behind her back all the time and she has no idea. What a loser.”
She had no clue that I was there and had heard her. It was then that I stopped wondering why she didn’t like me, and realized that she was just a nasty bitch. Last I’d heard, she’d seduced and then was dumped by some other guy who worked there. I hope she’s contracted a scarring STD by now.
I had recently started a job, and it was determined that it would take three people to do all the work I was responsible for, so we set about to hire two more. I was talking about it with my boss and another person. My boss said to the other person, “Well, we want to make sure we advertise this position so we’ll be sure to get good candidates. We don’t want it to go like it did with Sengkelat.” I really wanted to say “Um, I’m standing RIGHT HERE!” But it wouldn’t have made a difference, he was just an asshole.
Well, this wasn’t so much by chance as it was more by my asking.
I was dating this guy my mom fixed me up with when I was about 20. He wasn’t really my type, but I found things I liked about him and gave it a chance, I have an open mind. I started finding out things about him that really irked me; he was “that annoying guy” back in high school (and I could see why, all my friends hated this guy), he was a bible-thumper (I’m atheist), and he was just . . . obnoxious. But I was lonely and for some reason you overlook things when you are starting out in a relationship.
We went out to lunch one day in his home town and some girl he went to school with was a waitress there. They chatted it up out of my earshot. When he got back to the table I asked him who his friend was and if they went to school together, etc. He then tells me he asked her what she thought of me and she told him “she’s cute in a weird way”. What? Weird? I have never had a problem attracting all sorts of men. Granted, I’m not the cookie-cutter blonde hair, blue eyes, typical small-town country girl; I have deep auburn hair, green eyes, and at the time I had a killer body. So because I don’t look like you I’m now weird?
Another time, a friend of mine (she didn’t mean this to be cruel, but it was still the way it was presented) had me and my DH over to her apartment. When we walk in the door, she picks up this advertisement from a local photography company. It has a little girl on it who appears to be part asian. She shows it to my husband and says “who does this look like?”. They all start giggling and no one tells me who they’re referring to. The next day I kept prying him for what was so funny and he says “she looks like you with your tiny eyes, that’s what we all were laughing about.” That’s so unfair to laugh at me in front of my face and not tell me. I am part Irish and part Slovic, I have almond shaped eyes that occaisionally someone will ask me if I’m part Asian. That’s something I have no control over and I find quite beautiful about myself.
Once again, because I don’t look like everyone else, somehow I’m “funny”. This is what I get for hanging around people who live in small towns where all they see is their extended family.
I leaerned that one reason I didn’t get a job was because the prospective employer thought I was strange. According to an associate of mine, he heard that I used to take off my shoes and bite my toenails after dinner.
I kid you not.
Now, I am strange in some ways, I’ll grant you, but I do not, and never have, bitten my toenails at any time (I’m not sure I’m flexible enough to anymore).
As for where he got this from — having learned a bit more about the “dinners” referred to, I know the pool of people who were at them, and would be the likely source for such a rumor. The thing is, they were all friends, and I can’t imagine any of them saying anything like that.
I used to kind of date this guy, we’ll call him George. I thought George was really nice and cool and even though he was kind of flighty and hard to get ahold of, I ended up getting really attatched to him pretty quick. He was sending off some pretty strong “I like you too” vibes so I didn’t think that he was going to be an ass.
Well, he didn’t call for a couple of weeks and I figured he was just being a typical guy, confused or whatever about the “relationship” so I didn’t think much of it. Well, a couple days later, one of my good guy friends told me that he had talked to George because they had class together. He said George told him that I was slutty and just trying to “get some” from him.
That was honestly one of the most hurtful things that’s ever happened to me. I can’t believe someone would talk about someone behind their back like that while at the same time making the person think they like them! At least my friend had the guts to tell me what George had said, and now neither one of us talk to him.
I’ve got a good one. When I was an exchange student in Spain, my first day at my host family’s house happened to also be my birthday. So the family decided to have a neighbor boy take me out to the grand opening of a prestigious nightclub with some of his friends.
I spoke Spanish pretty well, but wasn’t fluent yet. The guy turned out to be a total snob who wasn’t thrilled with having to take the geeky exchange student girl with him on what he’d expected to be a hot night of clubbing, I guess. (Dude wasn’t too bright, b/c in general bringing an American girl out with you is seen as a positive). He and his friend kept referring to me as “la puta” in conversation that I couldn’t quite follow. As in “what will we do with la puta?” etc.
When we got to the nightclub they barely even introduced me to anyone and essentially abandoned me until it was time to go home. (This is absolutely unlike good manners in Spanish culture. Amazingly different from how I was treated by just about everyone else in the country!) Fortunately, I met plenty of nice people, many of whom had been exchange students to the US themselves and actually had a pretty good time.
It wasn’t until days or weeks later that, after replaying their conversation in my head, that I finally figured out who they meant by “la puta.”
That was the last and only time I did anything with that jerk.
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