Know Your Audience

Well, kiddies, in a few hours, we will be leaving for a week at family camp. It will be like a week at sleepaway camp, with more amenities. But not room service. Or my own bathroom. Or cable. It should be fun, though, since we will be, once again, getting away from it all, including the cube farm and the people I might run into there.

For example, when I worked at this place the last time (when I was pregnant with Bug), there was a group of us that all did the same thing. The group has since been divided in two, so I do not work directly with the people I worked with back then. Anyway, because I went on vacation, someone from the other group did some of my work. When I got back, I was told that This Person helped out. So then I met him and said "so you're the mythical This Person." It was then that I got a lecture on how he's not This Person, he's This Hyphenated-Person and how much it pisses him off when people get his name wrong. So I apologized and figured it would end. Nope. He kept going for ten minutes about how it was his idea to hyphenate, how he thinks it's wrong for women to change their names when they marry because they are abandoning their families for their husband's families, and blah blah blah. I was stunned. This Hyphenated-Person and I had maybe exchanged 4 words before this diatribe. For all he knew, I was some very conservative person or someone who wanted to abandon her own family, as opposed to someone who, even if she wanted to, chose not to hyphenate her name with the new name because the two of them together are so horrible that it would never have worked. I held my tongue. Of course, I nearly slapped him later when I walked back through his and my good pal's work area to hear him continue to blather on about how he chewed out his mother-in-law for getting the name wrong and then apologized later. His commentary on the subject, "well, I'm fairly sure most women would not have apologized the way I did."

That could be taken two ways:

1. They wouldn't have apologized at all (which is what I think he meant). OR
2. They wouldn't have given his lame-ass excuse for an apology.

So perhaps Mr. Ladies Don't Give Up Your Name When You Marry might be something of a misogynist. Nice.

On Friday, there was a meeting at work, and afterwards, rather than get in a crowded elevator, I ended up taking the stairs with Mr. Hyphen. He insisted on talking and said that he took the stairs because he didn't want to be like "all of the fatties that work here." Again, I was dumbstruck. How incredibly insensitive. He clearly thinks he's better than people who are not thin, which includes me. He kept blathering on and I just tried to tune him out. Boy was I glad when we got to our floor and could go our separate directions.

Any thoughts on how I should respond the next time the guy invariably says something out of line?