Oh never mind, if you can’t understand why she would be upset then I can’t help you.
Loach, are you serious? Some guy in a guitar shop is minding his own business and your daughter goes up to make small talk about guitars and you’re mad at him? I hope I was wooshed by your post, 'cause that’s so paranoid and freakalicious I can’t fathom it.
(And yes, I am a mom.)
The whole world ain’t about sex.
I disagree. There can’t be that many criminally deviant, perverted,blah-blah-whatever males out there.[SUP]1[/SUP] It’s the “even one is too many” mentality.
We’re saying “Live in fear girls, because there may be 1 guy out there bent on doing something bad to some one, and you just might run into him!!! Better to treat EVERYONE like they’re a depraved criminal than take the chance they’re a normal human being!!!” I hate this mentality.
- Can there?
Yes unfortunately there are. And WhyNot I’m a dad and a cop, maybe I see more examples of predators than you do. A 32 year old male who starts talking to a seemingly unsupervised 11 year old girl would send up red flags to me.
Well, there were two of them, and it was in the middle of a public place…
So, tell us how you would have rather seen the situation handled. Remember, they approached him, while he was more or less pinned in place by a guitar that was plugged into a power source.
handled by whom? Ogre could not have done anything different except show a little empathy after the fact. The mother should have removed her daughter from the situation but should have done it more subtly. Remember we know nothing about the mother or the daughter, she may have had to protect her from someone genuinely dangerous in the past.
Which lack of knowledge about what background events may have influenced her attitude had been brought up already. And explanations have been speculated upon.
I don’t think WhyNot would have been puzzled at all had you led with your last two posts, Loach, rather than the “if you can’t understand why she would be upset then I can’t help you” one-liner, which you must admit sounds dismissive. Don’t allow yourself to lose sight that to a truly innocent person, to suddenly find himself considered a threat or a suspect can be a real shock and leave them really shaken and puzzled as to whether they have been doing something wrong all along – and yes it does merit explaining to them how come this is so.
Yep, WhyNot’s all good now, thanks!
I understand being cautious, but I’ve also decided to live my life basically assuming people are good until they’ve given me a reason to believe otherwise. As a police officer, you don’t have that luxury. It could get you killed. (Has anyone thanked you yet today for doing your job? If not, thank you!)
While I won’t intentionally put myself or my children in a potentially dangerous situation, I also try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, including, in this thread: the mom, Ogre, the girls and Loach. And so far, those that have been given the opportunity to exonerate themselves (including you, Loach) have done so admirably. I simply trust that were mom and girls on this board, they’d also have understandable points of view on the situation, were we to have their whole backstory. So far, this theory on life has served me well.
Just to clear things up, I do think that mom did overreact. She could have separated the girls from the situation without being rude. I apologize for being dismissive initially, I can see how Ogre would feel after being basically accused of being a predator when he is nothing of the sort. What I have trouble understanding is that he couldn’t see that the mother might have a problem with her 11 year old talking to a stranger named Ogre. Especially if the name fits in any way 
You are welcome 
To be honest its been a little while since I’ve been able to do my job and it will be a while before I can do it again.
I am a gray haired old man who very much loves children, especially little children. I am always aware of a chid in my presence, and usually more aware than his mother, or father. I like kids. I like to watch them, I like to interact with them, and if they can talk, I like talking to them.
If the relationship ordinarily includes physical interaction, I love holding, and playing with them too. I really like watching very little kids discovering how to move in the world, and how to manipulate the objects in their reach. I think children are the absoute most wonderful thing in the world.
I also look pretty much exactly like Santa Claus. (Or Gerry Garcia, if you are a kid of the appropriate age.) That means that fairly often, children are at least as interested in me as I am with them.
Now, I am not going to act against the expressed non consent of a parent in the presence of their child, nor am I ever going to do anything to hurt a child, or even encourage a child to engage in behavior that could harm them. Unfortunately that includes talking with strangers. So, at some point, I make them get permission to continue to interact with me, if I meet a kid in public. And at that time, occasionally, I am treated like my love of children is a perversion, and the child goes away thinking Santa is a dirty old man.
Not much I can do about it. But I won’t stop loving children because of it.
Tris
P. S. By age 13 or so, most little girls are already convinced that Santa is a dirty old man, and guys with tatoos and guitars are the most interesting.
She didn’t know that his screen name was Ogre, for crissakes.
I’m sorry, Loach; I just can’t see it your way. They were in a public place. The mom did not overhear the conversation; she just jumped to the conclusion that All Men Are Bad. She physically dragged her daughter away from a situation that was not a threat. She made a scene, and probably embarrassed both girls (I know Ogre doesn’t count, because he’s one-a those guitar-playin’ bad boys).
A few more incidents like this, and the daughter will decide, “Well, mom’s gonna blow a gasket no matter what I do, so I’m just gonna do whatever I want. And lie about it; I’ll have to, of course.” If mom thinks every situation is bad and dangerous, daughter will have no perception of what really is bad and dangerous.
Now, I understand that mom has to be aware of where her daughter is, what she’s doing, who with, and so forth. But she could have accomplished that by keeping an ear tuned to the conversation, perhaps even walking up and joining it. Which, of course, would have resulted in a plea of “Mommmmmmmmm…You’re EMBARRASSING me!” But at least mom would have been acting like a socialized person, and treating Ogre like he was one as well.
You can’t lock your daughters in a tower, literally or figuratively. I know the statistics about abduction, sexual predation, and so forth. But that girl was not in danger simply because Ogre exchanged a few words with her about guitars.
For crissakes, I was implying that there may be an obvious reason why he pick the name Ogre. I don’t know I never met him.
When I was this age, I would have been flattered beyond belief that an older man had, in a safe environment, talked to me about an interest of mine, taken my interest seriously, and not dismissed me out of hand because I was a child.
Whatever. Any response to the rest of my post?
I think there’s a distinct possibility that Ogre and the rest of you are misunderstanding the situation.
Having been the parent of two chronically wandering, not where they are supposed to be, distractable children, I can easily imagine that mom and the kids had some kind of serious altercation earlier, and she was at her wits end when she grabbed the kids and hauled them off. It may have nothing at all to do with her suspicion of Ogre as a dirty old man, but rather that he was just one more frustrating distracton that her kids have managed to glom onto, instead of being where she told them to be.
I’m not proud of it, but several years ago after waiting in the car for 20 minutes for my then 13 year old daughter who was supposed to follow me out of Blockbuster, when I told her in clear tones “I’m leaving now” and she said “OK”. I paid for the movies, and waited, and waited, and waited for 20 minutes, and she did not emerge. Finally I had had enough, and and went back into the Blockbuster looking for her, and sure enough she was poking around the anime section obiivious to the world.
I should also note before continuing, that she made a chronic habit of this “not listening , not where she was supposed to be” behavior with her mother and I, and we had waited countless hours for her to emerge from after school activities and other occassions, where we invariably had to go hunting for her. Other peoples time and inconvience meant nothing to her. Our nerves were frayed with that particular behavior at that point.
Furious beyond the point of politeness, I grabbed her wrist and hauled her out of there with her protesting she didn’t know I had left. To all the world it looked like I was randomly persecuting this poor, helpless child.
Maybe she did think you were an incipient pedophile, andd maybe not . I’d wager there’s a lot more to the backstory of why mom was so upset, than you think and that it might have little to do with you personally, and more to do with your presence as an attractive distraction.
Ah, so that’s what you kids are calling it these days.
PS - Good choice on the guitar, Ibanez is the best.
Astro, it’s a good thought, except for this:
In that highly aggravated state, if some well meaning store employee had protested to me “But she wasn’t doing anything bad”, I might well have shot him a death glare too.
You weren’t playing a Jerry Lee Lewis tune, were you Ogre?
I’m with Rilchiam on this. According to the OP, Mom told her daughter “Come away from there right now!”, which doesn’t sound at all like astro’s case, but much more like what Ogre heard it as.
Sure, we need to be cautious in lots of situations, but it would be nice to be cautious in a reasonably civilized manner.