The Man-Child

Over grown, over educated (maybe even still in full time education whilst in their 30’s), living with family or friends (like some frat house experience), no commitment, if employed working on some type of made up position derived from some internship, opinionated, socially uncomfortable, self absorbed, full of their own self importance, stuck in their ways and clinging onto what they are used to, domineering, shifty body language, uncomfortable around women and women’s opinions.

The man-child.

Oh, and let us not forget when he cannot get people to succumb to his wants, needs, desires or whatever, he throws a tantrum. He demonstrates inappropriate anger in inappropriate ways to unsuspecting people.

Such a horrible specimen of ‘manhood’ was in my presence last night.

I have joined some social meet up groups within the Madrid area, and one of these was the Skeptics Group. Yes a skeptics group! Now usually I refrain form associating with Philosophers in general, why, well as a rule I have found them to be, I don’t want to generalise too much here; full of their own self importance, and of their own intellectual status. Yet, the group sounded interesting, so I thought I’d go along and see.

For some reason the organiser, the usual organiser, decided he couldn’t return from Germany for the meeting. So, he randomly nominated me as the stand in organiser for the meeting. As I explained to him, I was not familiar with Skeptical theory and it was my first meeting. Yet, this did not bother the organiser.

OK, well I assumed the group would be a nice bunch of individuals; understanding, able to listen, oh, and respectful of others. So, what the Hell, I gave it a go!

Throughout the meeting I felt a bad vibe from the only man in attendance (the friend, and associate of the actual group organiser). Now, the group was small, four including me – three women and one man. Yet, he wasn’t interested in us as people, he didn’t ask us anything about ourselves, our life or background. He was very clinical and odd. Strange body language, shifty and as though he wasn’t too happy with how the discussion was progressing.

Maybe he felt threatened by the female presence, frustrated he hadn’t been nominated stand in organiser by his friend (the actual organiser), perhaps he misconstrued some of what had been said (he was Spanish, and I think his English level wasn’t as good as he thought it was). I wonder if our native English tongue intimidated him, plus, the fact we didn’t necessarily agree with his opinions and views might have riled him too. Who can be sure!

It wasn’t until the conversation split; him and one woman, and me and the other woman present. I spoke only to say I had to leave soon, as I was tired, nothing much more. well, when I related this to him, he didn’t like this and decided to ‘flip out’. Only way to really describe it, he flipped out!

It was like he had been waiting patiently all night to say something, to cause an argument with me, and why, who knows, and who knows what bee was in in his bonnet!

Anyway, he accused me of lying, the reason I was leaving was another that I was too afraid to admit, I was being untruthful about my thoughts and feelings. I was concealing something from him!

What the………!! Did I just doze off, and wake only to find I had arrived in the Twilight Zone?

I had only just met him – two hours previous, and already he was convinced he knew my inner motives, he knew what I truly felt. I mean, if he had, he would have known I was thinking what a loser he was being at that particular moment! It seemed he was trying to depict me as this distrustful liar to the group for a reason. Wow, what insight, NO, what rude audacity!

I took it lightly, an argument with what was obviously an aggressive man was not on my list of ‘to do’s’ that day. So I said,
“Is he joking with me? He is fooling around right, he doesn’t mean it as I think he does”?
One of the women then replied,
“Yeah, he is fooling around, as no one would act like such an arse-hole” (jest intended to lighten the obvious prevailing bad atamosphere).

Oh dear, that was a mistake. He then turned his venom upon her.

Now my understanding of Spanish profanities is limited, as I am a lady 🙂 Yet, I am pretty damn sure he used everything in his arsenal to create one moment of utter hatred, which was aimed at an unsuspecting woman.

I was aghast. I was already standing up to go, and I could only just stand there, in complete shock. I didn’t know what the Hell he was playing at and why. I wondered whether it was a good idea to lurch across the table and spank him! Yet, the woman he spoke to with such a vile, and disgusting attitude was so calm; as too was the other woman witnessing it! They were cool and level headed, intelligent, articulate and capable women- admirable.

I was a little less cool; thinking and feeling, WTF!

For me, this is a massive NO! People, especially men, never speak to women as he was doing to this one. I was disgusted. I was shocked. I realised in that moment, this was no man, this was not a person worth my attention or time. He was nothing.

I told them all that I was leaving, and won’t be returning any time soon to a group with such a vile fool in attendance. It made no difference though, as he kept on; he had his argument, he was making himself feel better at any cost.

Intelligent, philosopher, man, human – NO, he was just an over grown child, an insecure and idiotic fool with a foul mouth.

I remember he said he had a blog. He said he had been writing about his attempts to meet a new person every week. What a sick joke! That was exactly what he was doing within the ‘skeptics group’, and look how he treated and responding to them, to us! God help those he does meet, they will be psychologically scared for life if he acts as he did with us!

This has made me really reconsider which groups I attend.

If there aren’t shouting bullies, there are pervy men trying their luck, and staring at your breasts and bum.

How am I ever supposed to meet nice, and genuine people in Madrid? Do they actually exist?

What this has suggested, though I hate to even consider it; women are never really able to go anywhere without feeling they maybe harassed at any moment.

Why is it men feel they have some power to weild over women?

Why can’t they just go out, and enjoy themselves free of being abusive bad mannerly fools, bombastic and opinionated chauvinists, and sexual predators?

Are all men really just versions of men-children?

As you can probably guess, I am still extremely annoyed by this ‘person’s’ behaviour. It has impressed some ‘downer’ upon me regarding human relationships, interactions and behaviour. Plus, this fool will never know nor admit he was in the wrong.

Also, to sum up the whole experience or night; the whole thing was some elaborate charade. It was some game set up by this nasty and foul mouth fool, and his friend the Skeptics Group organiser. It was as though they had planned such an end, it was as though they were setting us up for this, to test us in some way.

Sounds paranoid? Well, having witnessed the behaviour and considered the motives, and the things that just didn’t add up about the group, that weren’t bona fide about the night in general – this is my only conclusion. At least my conclusion isn’t a diatribe of disgusting profanities, though it could have been quite easily after what occurred!

Oh, and if you find yourself in Madrid, avoid the Skeptics Meet-up Group at all cost!

Excuse Me!!!!

What bugs me most, well, OK this particular thing is not THE most annoying thing in the whole world, but  it is on my ’10 things I hate’ list. Don’t believe me, well, check it out; 10 Things I Hate.

So, what is this annoying ‘little’ oversight, well, a lack of MANNERS of course!!!!!!!!

Living in a city is never going to be picture book perfection, I’m not crazy enough to think it is. Not everyone will always don smiles from ear to ear or be pleasant and happy. Nor will they dance and swirl around as though they are part of the cast of some lavish musical. Yet, I didn’t realise that SO MANY people could leave their homes every morning, and FORGET that one essential thing that makes this world that more sweeter and bearable; their manners.

Who brought them up exactly, parents or vultures?

What effort or time does it t of to express gratitude with ‘thank you’, ‘sorry’, ‘excuse me’ – ermmm, NONE! Well, not for me anyway, it is automatic because I am not an inconsiderate, selfish oaf.

Everyday on the streets and Metro, in the stores and museums of Madrid there are idiots. These idiots blatantly go out of their way to annoy, to cause disruption and general angst – basically these idiots are pushing their luck! I have often wondered when, or indeed IF, someone will one day just snap, and slap them!!

To be honest – it sometimes begins to feel like a battle, a free for all, a power struggle, a dominance thing. Call me paranoid, but it is almost as though these people are trying to root out those who are weaker, those whose nerve will cave in quicker, those who are foolish enough do adhere to manners and good conduct. They, these aggressive and arrogant morons, can then laugh at such weak considerate and mannerly people, as they mow us down on the street with their heels, handbags, elbows, dogs, pushchairs and God knows what else!!!

Honestly, good manners and consideration must be a rare thing here in Madrid now, a thing which will very soon be extinct.

People push and shove; they barge right into me, physically knocking me out of their way. They think nothing of cutting me up on the walkways, so I nearly trip up. They hog all the walkway too, and often walk as slowly as snails because they act as though THEY own that piece of ground, and I am an intruder. These idiots just keep walking, and I mean walking at me and into me, just like they intend to mow me over (which they do). They expect me, to give way to them, to jump up out of their way like a fricken acrobat; just so they and their lazy butts can get past without disruption or inconvenience. What, so two steps to either the left or right of me on a walkway is such a inconvenience??? MENTAL!!!! Good God, there is plenty of room for EVERYONE to walk, yet these fools won’t give way, WHY???!!!! WTF???!!! They would prefer to see me lying on the floor with their footmarks all over my crumpled and bruised body – seriously, they need their heads reading!

People also are not adverse to sitting, standing or talking too close to my personal space (again, when there is NO need as there is plenty of room for us all to be in one place without sitting on each other)!!! Men will take the last seat on the Metro train while a woman stands up with shopping. Children bump into me, and play about without a care of whose foot they are trampling all over. Their parents, well, absent, and engaged in loud conversation about nonsense – too busy to tell their offspring ‘STOP IT’!!! People stare, really stare, the daggers are out type of stares! Honestly, I can be travelling on the Metro, minding my own business, and for the entire journey I can be stared at. These people thing nothing of wasting their time looking me up and down and up and down, as though I am some freak of nature. It is like I’m dressed in my underwear only, which is something I never do, and yet those who do dress like that NEVER get stared at. WHY?!!!!!

I am becoming a little more ARGHHH everyday – and I think, I shall be the one to slap the next person guilty of these crimes of ill mannerly foolishness.

So, take heed people of Madrid and BEWARE!!

Are You Being Served?

In the UK, probably like any other country, monetary transactions in a commercial shopping environment is marred by blatant rudeness. I hear people moan how the sales people in the UK just aren’t quite what they used to be; efficient, pleasant,  polite and helpful. Well, lets be honest they don’t all offer the same level of customer service as that provided in the U.S for example!!!

Yet, is this always the case? Are the sales people really the problem or is there more besides to consider?

Now I understand 1st hand what it is to be a sales person, having worked in retail during my time in college and university. I understand disaffection, dissatisfaction, resentment amongst staff, terrible working hours and wages. Many sales people who serve you in shops, supermarkets and take your telephone calls everyday, are also no doubt college students. Students feeling just as I did; bored and sick of inane complaints over inconsequential things (bad attitude right? Well that’s every college students prerogative)!

Although in mentioning a bad attitude, rudeness for the sake of it is NEVER excused. I was never a surly, lazy or nasty, that is not my style. Yet, this old adage too that “the customer is always right” is completely WRONG!!!

There are those customers who are the thoroughly horrible, nasty, rude, ill mannered, intimidating and threatening type. I know as I have experienced these people. There is something about ‘shops’ in general that induce customers to act in a way completely alien to their normal behavioural types. In fact if such behaviour transpired on public streets, they’d often be arrested for it! I mean what sane person, a grown man for example, is willing to threaten a 18yr old girl?? Only in a shop where the older man is a customer, and 18 year old is a sales person (me).

What right has any customer to call a sales person stupid, a bitch or threaten them with violence??? Is it just because the customer is annoyed with the shop, the products, or annoyed with their own lives and inadequacies? After all the sales person doesn’t own the shop, has no control on the stock and tries their best to do what they can for a customer, even a rude and nasty customer!

I mean even murderers have human rights so why doesn’t a sales person too???

What crime have they really committed except for working for a terrible company that won’t protect their own staff’s safety, by advocating a no tolerance of customer abuse and violence against them. Is it their fault they have ineffective and un-supportive managers, who allow customers to rule the roost?

All of this abuse happens more often than you’d even think too. I KNOW AS I’VE seen it all happening. Appalling,  yes it is as stores think this is OK – that their staff should be OK with this lack of support from people responsible for them, and take such abuse with a smile.

This barrage of name calling and so on can occur on a daily basis, and the customer is never ‘pulled up’ on it. Yet, if the staff say one thing deemed inappropriate, they can face discipline or even the sack. Isn’t it only fair; if you can give abuse you should expect to receive it in return, customer or not?

So, next time you are in a shop and the sale person is a little unhappy, not cheerful, and doesn’t have a fake smile plastered over their face, is a little short tempered or perhaps ill-mannered; give a thought as to why. Consider this  before you jump to conclusions, for vexing your ideals of perfect customer service.

Perhaps just before they served you they had been victims of verbal abuse, threatened with violence, not supported by their management. Perhaps they have been made to feel like garbage just because they are sales people and not Doctors or Lawyers somewhere.

Sales people are only people too; they have feelings, rights, families and aren’t there to be abused.

Think about it!

10 Things I Hate

Pic from: hartlove.wordpress.com

 

Going on our merry way through life, we all tend to pick up things that rankle us. Whether they are designed for such purposes or not, they do.

Sometimes it is as though the universe itself converges upon me, just with one thought at heart; to annoy, cause disharmony, disrupt and blatantly infuriate me!

With all this in mind I sat down and considered, funnily enough not for long, what my top ten most hated things were (in relation to situations mainly).

So, here they are – enjoy and hopefully you can empathise too?!

1. Where ever you sit down or park your car – doesn’t matter how empty a place is, someone HAS TO situate themselves near you. WHY? Is it herd mentality?

2. Bad manners. Now this I cannot abide. Manners cost nothing. It is a sign of courtesy, a display of appreciation which makes everyone’s day a little more pleasant. Whether it is a ‘thank you’ or holding a door open for someone; the sentiment behind the act is priceless.

3. People who wear summer clothing just because they see a glint of sunshine in February (or any other time of year when it is equally as freezing cold)!!

4. Those people who never truly listen, but merely wait for their turn to speak. This is not conversation, this is not empathy, this is not courteous. This type of discourse only makes for frustration, and a feeling of being under-valued.

5. People who bring all their problems to your door, but when you need an ear to listen or a shoulder to cry on they run for the hills. This is not friendship, but a free counselling service!

6. Queues. Whichever queue you join it will be the one that takes the longest to get served. Fact!

7. People who drive whilst brushing their hair and applying make-up, speaking on a mobile phone, texting their friends, whilst reading a map or whilst using a laptop (yes, I actually have witnessed a truck driver doing this very thing)!

8. People who do not know the meaning of giving way whilst walking on a sidewalk. They negotiate the sidewalks as badly as they drive. I know here in Madrid getting from A to B can be a free for all – pushing and shoving, whole groups of people blocking your path and taking over the whole sidewalk; even dogs and children running into you. I hate it – MOVE OVER and let other people be on their way PLEASE! Regardless of what you may think, you DON’T own the sidewalk!!!

9. People who just STARE at you for no reason, as though they haven’t seen another human being in about 10 years. WHY!  

10. People who inflict their BAD ATTITUDES on you for no reason other than you happen to be near them at that moment. I actually experienced this quite recently whilst I was visiting my Grandmother in Accident and Emergency. Some psycho woman thought it was OK to ‘get up in my face’ just because she was having a bad day. Like I wasn’t!!!! Oh well, she was having a bad day, well then that behaviour is excused and all is OK – just go ahead and make my day even more awful, just as long as you get all your anger off your chest; errr, NO!

Just 10 things?? WOW, I really feel I could ‘vent’ 10 more!!!!

WHAT ABOUT YOU??? Have any of YOU anything to add to my modest list of annoyances????

PLEASE – LET ME KNOW!!!!!!!     

Are We Calling Time On The Gentlemen?

In a recent interview Dita Von Teese (famous Burlesque Dancer), said she believes that ‘a gentleman is sexy’. Yet, aren’t such old-fashioned standards dead and forgotten by men, carried away by their expectations of a quick and easy one night tryst?! I wonder what qualities a man has to possess to constitute being classed a ‘gentleman’ these days? Hasn’t that ideal shifted and taken quite a severe dent? Even if gentlemen still exist, do women want one? Is there room for such men in today’s society?

I know I have been brought up a little old-fashioned. Instilled with manners, etiquette, principles, scruples and standards; in short I know how to behaviour in polite company, how to conduct myself. I in turn value these things in others, but it doesn’t make me any less forward thinking, liberal or liberated; I am outspoken (I can fight my corner like a tiger if needs be), I am not weak, submissive, dull, stupid, dependent or somehow sub normal. I know that for some women, the very notion of a man holding a door open for her is considered an outrage, a ghastly and degrading act; well, I respect such actions, as I would do the same for anyone myself! That act does not detract anything from my independence as a woman, who has rights. What puts me off is a lack of manners; ‘manners maketh the person’ after all. An example of such bad manners; a group of men who were happy to ogle at me, but then quickly enough barged me off the sidewalk and into the road so they could pass first, as though I was mere trash. Now that ladies is more degrading than a simple act of holding a door open out of mannerly courtesy.

Having manners, showing respect, being courteous and acting with dignity isn’t something to be viewed as suspicious, a clash with women’s rights, nor is it out of touch with modernity. I think it demonstrates the old adage, ‘do unto others as you would have done unto yourself’, at least until given a reason to do the contrary!

Now surely being a gentleman embodies such traits too? Official Oxford Dictionary definition of gentleman; ‘a chivalrous, courteous, or honourable man’, originated from Middle English (in the sense ‘man of noble birth’): in later use the term denoted a man of a good family.  So the term still bears the same qualitative meaning!

Consider momentarily a man who doesn’t demonstrate, dignity, respect, courtesy and manners; what type of lover would he make? These are essential elements in any would be relationship, without them you are just an object, and the man has no concern for you as a person at all. Why then do we so easily compromise on manners? Or gentlemanly qualities? Why do we forgive burly machismo, but abhor a man with kindly manners?

I know I’m not the only woman out there who is despondent with what seems to be the ‘show me your boobs’, drink until we collapse culture of today. When I see such leery and obnoxious men, this is when it is more obvious just how infrequently I get to see the species called gentlemen. This is when we all need to see the gentleman the most; to restore faith in all women, to show that not all men are just sex crazed idiots, who categorize women according to how good their breast look. That there are many men out there who are genuine, do care and that can treat women like human beings, not just objects.

With all things considered I believe there are gentlemen out there in the world, I have seen the proof. They are not the Prince who will whisk you away on a white horse into the sunset, but real men; men who value women, and don’t compromise their manners, courtesy or respect towards other people. Gentlemen are something worth vindicating, valuing and celebrating; a world without them would be a world lacking much-needed class.

Below pic:  Gentlemen, just a thing of the past???

As ever I would like to have your opinions on this topic please.

Leave your comments below, thanks 🙂

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