I am lousy at showing competence when I meet people face to face. I get consistently bad grades in oral examinations, and I do badly in job interviews. Maybe it has something to do with bad eyecontact, and the fact that I talk too fast.
Anyway, the thing I hate the most about those situations is that I have to accept their insult without possibility to retort. Since they have power over me in the situation. So to get my anger out, I will now write what I was thinking back then:
History examn:
examinator: What do you call the period from around 1947 to 1989?
Me: Ehm, the cold war…
Me, thinking:
What the FUCK? I am being examined in the German democratic republic. I have told you that Erich Honecker was the chairman 1976-1989 and what his policies were. I have told you the figures for the GDP in the different decades. And now you don’t think I know what the cold war was? I have a question for you: Can you name a word that rhymes with “pidiot”?
Student project interview:
Center head: Things don’t seem to stick so well in your mind?
me: Was that a question?
Center head: No, more of an observation.
me: (silence)
Me, thinking: Well, here is another observation: Fuck you.
You think the most important thing in the world, is what the names are of the people who goes through the material we have in our textbooks? You know, we have a system that allows us to know how skilled students are. It’s not called “which lecturer have you smalltalked with”. It’s called “grades”.
You think you’re great because you are the leader of this center? Well. I have seen that you have a couple of molecular biologists working under you. But when I told that I was a molecular biologist, you asked whether that was about genetics. That’s the goddamn stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And even though you worked with programming, it sounded like you’d never heard of trees. Please, don’t you have someone proper I can talk to?