Experts Share The Cringey Moments People Insisted They Knew Better
We’ve all dealt with condescending people. Those people who talk down to us and claim to know everything, when they really know nothing.
If there’s a silver lining to condescending people, it’s the opportunity to completely shut them down, especially when you yourself actually can speak on a subject accurately and authoritatively.
Here are some examples of people being condescending and, at the same time, totally off base.
1. No One Wants to Hear About Your Favorite Obscure Bands
So I have a PhD in musicology. The number of random people I encounter who give me unsolicited music advice and deign to explain to me the nuances of their favorite band that I've never heard of is UNREAL.
Like, it happens so often that I now don't tell people the field in which I have my degree if that tidbit of info is at all possible to avoid.
So one time, I had this dude who worked at a record shop going on and on and on about some 70s band I'd never heard of, and I grew tired of it and tried to politely excuse myself. He then got super grumpy and increasingly volatile until he said, “
It's not like you're a music professor at Harvard and I'm not!” To which I got to reply, while leaving: “Actually, I was invited to teach for a semester at Harvard recently. Have a nice day.”
2. The Employee Isn’t Always Right
I was in a computer store getting a cable or something for a PC build. The customer next to me flags down the sales guy and asks to buy a sound card for their laptop.
He looks at the lady like an idiot and then goes on for a minute or so about how they don't even make such a product. I got a PCMCIA sound card off the shelf behind the sales guy and handed it to the customer, then walked away.
3. At Least Everyone Was Understanding
Back over the summer, my wife and I had a cookout and, as we do sometimes, we invited some of the neighbors, including a family who had just moved in a few weeks before.
As we're all hanging out, my wife noticed the wife of the new family was constantly on the phone, so she asked her if everything was okay and if she needed help.
The woman explained that her father had suffered a heart attack a few nights before and that her mother was just keeping her “in the loop.”
She then said they were also looking into legal action of some kind because her father had several broken ribs after the heart attack, and that someone must have been “too rough” on him.
At that point, my wife said, “I don't think it's that they were too rough on him. If they had to perform CPR, it's highly likely that is when his ribs got broken.
It's unfortunate but, statistically, broken or cracked ribs happen about 30-40% of the time." The woman looked at my wife and said, “I don't need your opinion or some factoid you picked up while surfing the Internet.”
My wife kind of shrugged and said, “Actually, I didn't read that on the Internet. It's a fact that I learned when I was doing my training to become a paramedic, and they told us it would happen.
It still scared the heck out of me the first time it happened, though…and I still whisper 'I'm sorry' when it happens to this day 15+ years later.”
After confirming with several other people there that my wife is, indeed, a paramedic with over 15 years of experience and knew what she was talking about, she apologized for her "snippy" answer and said she was “just stressed out.”
4. What an Embarrassing Situation
A woman at a snooty scholarship dinner was telling me how she was doing the “boot camp”-type workouts and how they are EXACTLY like what they do in the US army and just as difficult.
I was fine with her thinking that, but I mentioned it’s easy to workout hard for one hour and then go home to a warm house. She asked, “What do you even know about it, did you get second-hand info from your boyfriend?”
I asked her to open her event program, as I was the key speaker on female veteran experiences, and my topic was “lack of visibility of the female veteran.”
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