This thread will either be entertaining or it’ll sink like a rock, to my shame and embarrassment. I’m brave, so here goes…
I expect we’ve all run into people who take pride in, um, shall we call them unusual acts, situations, or accomplishments. My daughter just married into a family that has what I consider to be a real doozy.
We first met her then-future inlaws on Christmas Eve, 2006. They bragged to us that the TV in their family room had never been turned off in the 6 years they’d been living in that house. A year and a half later, we were helping our almost son-in-law move his stuff out of the house. No one was home. But the TV was on.
They did have to turn it off a month later when they moved, but I expect once it was plugged in, it went back into the permanent-on mode.
I’ve met quite a few people who are proud that they’ve never read a book, and people who are proud they don’t pay attention to news. Also people who are proud they don’t even own a television or only watch PBS, like that makes them superior people.
I myself am proud that I can touch my tongue to my nose.
My father is immensely proud of all the stuff he finds in the dump, and, even more, of his cleverness in bypassing rules about not removing items from the dump (his strategies include befriending the dump employees, arriving at times when no one is watching, and strategic placement of his van to hide his nefarious activities). I grew up with him, so I think dumpster diving is quite normal, but several friends have expressed shock when hearing of this hobby. And his pride in getting around the law in order to obtain a 1970s vacuum cleaner that doesn’t work is a bit weird.
My father, each day, buys 4 different newspapers. It is obvious that he doesn’t read all these papers in one day, so eventually they start to pile up all over the house, (mostly in the living room.) It drives my mother so crazy that she doesn’t invite people over to the house and when she cleans she will pick up a few papers here and there (that she thinks he won’t notice) and throw them away.
One Saturday she did this. The following day she finds my father going through all his piles looking for this one paper. She thinks he will just give up, but 2 hours later he is still looking and he is yelling because he can’t find it. She finally admits to him that she took a bunch of the papers to the recycling bin. (The same recycling bin that is the parking lot of the local police department of which he is a patrolman.) He gets in to his truck, goes down to the parking lot, jumps into the huge silver bin and went through all the papers until he found it.
He wasn’t embarrassed at all. Just pissed off at my mother because she “touched his stuff”. And he tells all his friends and our family to what extreme he will go to if we “fuck with his papers”.
I know a few people who are occasionally a bit belligerent about their religious beliefs - and have said (words to the effect) “If I’m annoying people, I must be doing something right”.
Hey, most anybody can do it, but only a few chosen ones are allowed!
My mom’s friends (ladies in their 60’s) are quite proud that they have no earthly idea how you’d go about changing a tire. One of them never put gas in her car until her husband died.
For some reason, I seem to have attracted a lot of these people into my life. Maybe it’s the IT field in general, maybe just my damned luck. Just tons and tons of people who think it’s some great cosmic achievement to work 80+ hours a week, have no personal life, alienate their family and lord it over ‘inferior’ people who don’t work so many hours.
The ones who really bug me are the people with a certain amount of knowledge and position in an obscure (or not so obscure) small pond. Ala the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Their entire world revolves around their dominance in something completely worthless to 99.999999999% of the people in the world, yet their arrogance and condescending behavior to people who don’t know or give a shit about their field is simply astonishing. Yeah - “You’re proud of that?”
