Don’t sweat it, sweetie, you’re not the first or last to come to an impasse with our wealthy dilletante here. He even refuses to tell us what country he’s posting from, although he’s dropped more than enough clues to show that he’s one of those Saudis who periodically go to Europe to have fun and then comes back home, living off Daddy’s money with a pretty useless degree in ‘Islamic studies’.
I think the reason he annoys me so much, out of all the posters on the board who annoy me, is that he reminds me of Rodney. Rodney was a homeless guy who used the phone at the shelter to call my workplace in the '80’s, a state government information clearinghouse, to basically complain and offer wild conspiracy theories as to why every single program we offered to help him was corrupt, useless, anti-white (although he played this card very infrequently) and pointless. He never gave his name (we got his partial name from the shelter). He never screamed at us, except once when one guy had enough and cursed him out. Everything you offered him–job training, alcohol and drug counselling, employment centers, unemployment and housing benefits–“just won’t work for me and you know it!” but he never said WHY. He was fairly articulate, middle-aged, soft-spoken, and had a good vocabulary. He would call back several times a week for months, and if it was slow, the whole staff would listen in, stifling giggles, as the unlucky respondent would wrestle with him trying doggedly to help, knowing it was pointless and would not be heeded.
Anyway, his main way to wiggle out of things was to start the ad hominem attacks when cornered. He’d start off with saying, to whoever was speaking no matter what the accent or race, “You sound very middle-class. I bet YOU’VE never had to work a day in your life!” and go on and on about how we couldn’t possibly understand his (mysterious) plight. When I told him I was a working-class kid from the Bronx who had eight years of student loans still to pay, he simply said “You’re a liar. And you know it. You know people, that’s how you got this job” which BTW was a pretty sucky and low-paying job to begin with.
There was no caller ID back then but when we tracked down the shelter it confronted him, and he stopped. Frankly, I’m quite dismayed that our Rodney has a credit card so he could sign on, and I remain mystified that the mods are OK with the personal attacks he uses on the most benign of posters when he feels backed into a corner, which with his faulty logic he usually quickly is. But I’m happy to be on the Board and I learn a lot from others here, so I don’t let it bother me too much.
But I thought he might want to know why I used to try to get him to see reason. I was hoping here I could help this Rodney. Oh well.
