My wife suspects she unintentionally hurt her best friend’s feelings recently. Friend, call her “Ann”, was talking about the difficulties a third friend, say “Charlene,” was having with a (I think it was) mildly hyperactive child, and how Charlene had confessed that she sometimes thinks she’d be a lot happier if she could somehow give this kid away and trade him in for a more “normal” child.
Just in the way of gossiping as they do, my wife told Anne that Charlene ought to feel ashamed for thinking such things about her own child, and she ought to buck up and stop feeling sorry for herself. From the momentary silence on the line, my wife realized that Anne – whose son is autistic – might have had such thoughts herself in the past. But she couldn’t think of any way to apologize or mitigate her earlier remarks without accentuating the awkwardness.
A little off-topic but that reminds me of something
I was working with a client, a young wealthy New York mom. She lived in a gorgeous 5 story townhouse with a large central stairwell. She had 3 small children, their playroom was at the 5th Floor level of this stairwell.
So I’m chatting with her, we are standing on the stair landing at about the 3rd floor level. Suddenly we hear a noise. We look up and see that 3 giggling children have hung a stuffed monkey by the neck on a long bungee cord and are bouncing him in the open stairwell.
She was stunned speechless…finally she muttered " I don’t think I like that". I said…“Yeah, it’s so innocent and yet so wrong”. I think she just let it slide, frankly the kids were so young ( all under 5 ) that I don’t know what else she could’ve done, I don’t think she could’ve explained it to them.
I lived with a single-dad for a short time in college. (My roommate moved away, this guy was kind enough to let me stay with them until I got “back on my feet.”) His son was 5. One day his son gave me this…something, it looked like a chunk of drywall…I couldn’t figure it out. He was so proud of this thing he called “paper” because he made it at school for me. I said something like “It looks like you broke a chunk off a wall.” The poor kid was crushed, and his dad said “He really did make that for you. It’s supposed to be paper, the kids were learning how to make their own paper.” I felt like the biggest ass.
I was working on the lighting in her private home. We were trying to light a 3 panel freestanding mirror and not having much luck, nothing was positioned so it would come in at the correct angle. I was looking at myself in the mirror and I looked horrid…weird shadows and dark spots on my face.
Then the client stepped up to mirror and said (not understanding what we were fussing about) “I don’t see the problem it looks fine”
I said, half under my breath, “well, YOU’D look great no matter how bad the lighting is”. Suddenly her face turned dark and she turned to me " What DID you just say?"
I just said…"it was a compliment, sorry " and that seemed to calm her but she was always a little cold to me after, though.
It wasn’t the photographer who was fired. It was a Southwest Airlines employee who had heard the photographer’s line at a Christmas party for handicapped children (including the airline employee’s mentally disabled daughter) the night before, and repeated it when he noticed a photographer taking a picture (of a black family, as it turned out) at the Southwest shindig.
There was also a mall Santa around here who got fired after telling a black kid who was sitting on his lap, “Would you like to see a monkey? Go look in a mirror, you’ll see a monkey.” A little harder to justify.
First time I saw this thread I couldn’t think of any time I’d ever unintentionally offended someone, but an incident happened just today.
We’ve got a horrific contractor whose work I’ve had to spend a considerable amount of time correcting over the past couple weeks. The contractor’s last chance came up today, and a coworker offered to go over the job since I didn’t have the time. She spent hours on it, and I guess it stressed her out more than the previous jobs had stressed me.
I was reviewing my coworker’s work, since this is the job I’m going to terminate someone over, and found a few errors. Not real big ones, but since this is a job we’re going to fire someone over, I decided to mention them to the coworker. No malice, no intention to be a jerk, just ‘hey, I found a couple things you missed.’
I might as well have told her she wasn’t fit to work at McDonald’s. She broke down into tears, snarled at me that it’s not like I was all that either and that I had no right to criticize her after she spent so much time on that godawful job, grabbed her stuff and stormed out.
Which, you know, she was probably right and it seems kind of thoughtless in retrospect, but I didn’t act any different from how I usually do and we’ve gotten along fine for years. As far as anyone else can tell she’s just had a monstrously stressful week and that was urine icing on a turd cake.
Not me but my then-boyfriend. We were at his work’s Christmas Party at a bar when suddenly my then-BF and his coworker came in from outside, and his coworker was all pushing and shoving my then-BF trying to pick a fight with him. My then-BF was an easy-going, non-confrontational guy so I was totally confused. Well it turned out that in the course of joking around my then-BF called his coworker a “diddler” and his coworker flew straight off the handle. My poor then-BF had NO IDEA that “diddler” means “child molester”, he thought it meant “silly person” or something. It took some time talking the other guy down and explaining before things got smoothed over.
Ha, that last one reminds me of another not-me-but-my-wife story. Back before we were married, a friend of ours made some silly joke, and my wife laughed and said “You nutball!”
He immediately turned furiously red and shouted, “Cum guzzler!” and stormed out of the room.
Was bizarre. But he was genuinely offended. He didn’t stay mad, but he never really believed my wife didn’t mean anything by the term “nutball” despite everyone else in the room explaining that it doesn’t mean anything bad.
This general situation has happened to me several times, but I will give the specifics of one occurence.
My daughter had joined a club at school. I went to a parent’s meeting to discuss how to support the club with fund-raising, etc. I met another mother and chatted with her for several minutes. In the course of the conversation she mentions her daughter, Ann Smith, and her younger (age 14 or so) daughter, Jane Jones. She also mentioned that Jane’s father had died several years before. I’d reached the point of exchanging phone numbers, I’d given her my name and number and I ask her what her last name is, so that I can write it down. She says very huffily " it is Jones!" I hastily apologize, say " I wasn’t sure if perhaps you had remarried…" She proceeded to launch into a 5 minute monologue about how her late husband had treated her like a princess and why would she remarry and have to put up with some other man’s shit like she had had to do with her first husband…? Geez, lady, how the hell am I supposed to know that shit?
Oh my gosh, this reminds me of when I was an assistant manager of a movie theater and jokingly (with much affection) called one of the employees a knucklehead because she was being cute and adorable. She was suddenly nearly in tears saying that in her culture (this was about 20 years ago, so I’m blanking on what it was) any nature of insult was very very insulting and painful.
A friend on Facebook posted a picture. It had some kind if pink fish and a bible verse on it. It was… amateur, to be kind. I made a snarky comment along the lines of “I also enjoy eating fish.” (The friend and I have a history of good natured ribbing about his religion and my lack of.)
I get an email 30 minutes later. “My friend from high school died last night from metastatic breast cancer. Her last name was Trout. Her brother made that to put up to remember her.”
Oh geez… Yeah I immediately deleted and apologized.
There was a guy at my first university like that. He was a black guy from CA recruited for the basketball team. Thought everyone hated him because he was black. My first university was in Hawaii. 60% of the population of the school were international students, most of whom were from the Pacific Islands. Caucasian kids were actually the minority. We hated him because he was a jerk with a chip on his shoulder.
My roommate and I got into quite the fight my second year at that school because I offended her. She had started out as a theater major and realized 18 months in, after not getting cast in any of the school productions, that theater probably wasn’t her calling. She decided on elementary education and seemed very excited about the major change. Two weeks after declaring this major she comes to me just thrilled because she’s found her calling in life: Drafting. As in paper and pencil big ol’ folio drafting. I was a bit taken aback. Why drafting? Her uncle was in drafting and she pictured herself coming home from work in a business suit and a big leather folio in hand. I was perplexed. This didn’t seem like a very smart way to pick a major. I mistakenly asked “What happened to teaching?” She completely blew up at me and didn’t speak to me for a week. This was awkward because our dorm room was very small. It only got better when a mutual friend intervened. I had to apologize for not being supportive of her dreams. She never did switch her major to drafting, though.
Here’s one where the other person involved would probably say she unintentionally offended me and I was being irrational. My opinion differs, but there are things I would do differently. This was at least five years ago, probably.
I put my Christmas wish list up on Facebook. A family friend, that I’m not terribly close to but I’d count as friends, got snippy about why was I telling people what to buy. I pointed out that it was a family tradition to give out a wish list, as suggestions, and that nobody in their right mind thought it was commands. I think it was also at that point I asked if she had PMS. She reversed the question, got snippier, etc. I said I wasn’t going to talk about it any more, but was mad enough to save the conversation as “proof” that I was right (because, y’know, that’s totally how these things work). She unfriended me.
I deleted the file a couple of days later, because I try to be a better person than that. I don’t know if she’s learned yet that what’s ‘right’ in her family isn’t right for everybody in the world (I doubt as she’s old, set in her ways, and very opinionated). We’re about as close as we were before, more or less, (although I don’t think she’s going to give me another birthday party), but I can’t help but to have lost respect for her.
When I was 16, my first job was as a cashier at a grocery store. There had recently been a few fake $100 bills floating around, so every time a customer used one we had to have it verified by a manager. An older lady came through my line and used one, so I called a manager to check it. He took it to the back room and she asked what was happening. I explained the situation and she said, “That’s ridiculous. It wasn’t me who’s been passing off fake $100 bills”. I totally thought she was kidding, so I replied, “We’ll cross you off our list, then.”
She turned bright red, leaned forward, and said, “If you say one more word to me, when that manager comes back I’ll have him fire you.” Then I turned bright red, the manager came back, I gave her her change, and she was gone. In retrospect I don’t feel so bad (I mean, who takes it personally when people verify high-dollar bills?), but I suppose I could have come off more acerbic than I intended.