I am the biggest bitch in the world.

[rivka]

Rivka: Good morning.
Health Club Clerk: Oh, good for you, you made it in.
Rivka: [silently wonders why this is news]
Health Club Clerk: [takes membership card to scan] I have a friend, she's got multiple sclerosis, and she blah blah blah.
Rivka: Why are you telling me this?
Health Club Clerk: [says more things about her friend with multiple sclerosis]
Rivka: [slightly louder] Why are you telling me this?
Health Club Clerk: Well... what do you have?
Rivka: That's a personal question. That's none of your business.
Health Club Clerk: Oh. But I just...
Rivka: [firmly] It's a very rude question. [walks away]
Health Club Clerk: [calling after her] I'm sorry! I didn't mean to hurt your feelings!
Rivka: [calling back] You didn't "hurt my feelings," you made me angry.
Health Club Clerk: Ma'am, ma'am, please come here. Please accept my apology.
Rivka: [alarmed] Okay, just... okay, don't cry.
Health Club Clerk: [crying] I am going to cry. I've had a really bad day, and...
Rivka: Look, I'm sorry you've had a bad day, but...
Health Club Clerk: Please, please say you accept my apology.
Rivka: Fine. I accept your apology. Okay.

Sheesh.

Comments

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

This started as a kind-of thinking answer, turned into a ramble, and then maybe turned into babble. I suppose that's never really stopped me from speaking up before, but be warned...

Well... I think one thing that's important to recognize is that *NO ONE* sees the inside of the other person's skull.

I'm sure that the person didn't mean to be offensive. She's not an evil, cruel, heartless person.

But, it's a crazy situation.

Rivka did nothing wrong. She had a perfectly normal, perfectly human, response to an unpleasant situation. She didn't deserve to have to deal with another person's emotional breakdown. She didn't cause it; it wasn't her fault.

(And, Rivka, if you feel that it was, it's natural. If a person does something that hurts another, the 'doer' will probbably feel at fault, whether it's gently touching horribly sunburned skin, or having a perfectly justified annoyance reaction to someone. But, it wasn't your fault.)

The clerk didn't *intend* to do anything wrong, but, sooner or later, the clerk has to learn that there are some things that cross the line. It would have been much, much happier a world if someone could have tapped her on the shoulder at that moment, given a quick shushing motion, giving Rivka a clear escape route, and then talked to the clerk until she understood what she was doing wrong.

Herm. It's really pretty normal for folks to talk about how terrible the clerk is, to try to emphasize that it's not Rivka who did anything wrong, and it can look like these people are demonizing the clerk.

I hope they're not... but even if they are, well... it's a tricky situation. Try to defend the clerk too much, and you can start making it look like Rivka over-reacted to the clerk who was, after all, probably just flustered.

And yeah, the clerk *was* probably just flustered, probably not a bit of mean in her. But she was still being annoying, still caused annoyance (however inadvertantly), and it wasn't Rivka's problem to deal with, and she *didn't* over-react.

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

I can see and agree. I guess what I keep thinking about is a friend's experience. (Since I don't really have any of my own.) He had muscular dystrophy, was wheel-chair bound and couldn't raise his hand to his face. He was also a very bright English major in my college. We took some classes together, and I usually sat next to him to help him out. One of my teachers obviously didn't know how to handle any disability, never mind one that he felt was as gross as needing someone else to help you blow your nose. So for the entire class, in fear of offending my friend I guess, and possibly just in fear of my friend, my teacher ignored him. The entire semester. Never even looked at him. He once commented in a sort of awe about how I managed to help my friend without being totally weirded out.

Obviously, my professor had a greater responsibility to my friend than the towel attendant did to Rivka. And there is a difference between not prying into someone's disability, and ignoring someone because they have a disability.

So I have great sympathy with Rivka's annoyance with the attendant, but I also have sympathy with the attendant. And I'm afraid that if people keep hearing about how they should never say X, Y or Z to a disabled person for fear of being rude, well, they'll never say anything to a disabled person for fear of being rude.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Nod. I feel badly for the attendant as well; I could have done the same thing in different circumstances at different times in my life.

It's a tricky thing, I suppose.

Yeah, people have to learn, and they can't just be told "don't do that! It's horribly rude!" every time they blow it.

But, in the end, there's really no way to teach people the proper way to act all the time. The only way to learn to avoid doing the wrong thing is to screw up once in a while, realize you screwed up, and try to learn why things blew up in your face, and realize when there's enough of a pattern to recognize.

It sucks when there's a lot of pain involved in those screwups, but, well, that's just the way life is.

Keep in mind that, even if it looks like some folks are upset with the attendent, no one is saying anything to the attendent. If they were speaking to the attendent, they'd be more sympathetic, and explain why she was being rude, and probably comfort her, explaining that, no, she hadn't committed some horrible, grievous sin, she'd been annoying, "go forth and (try to) sin no more", and all that.

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think you're right.

Poor Rivka! With all this long discussion going on in her journal/inbox.

Thank you for allowing this discussion, Rivka. I do appreciate it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that, even if it looks like some folks are upset with the attendent, no one is saying anything to the attendent. If they were speaking to the attendent, they'd be more sympathetic, and explain why she was being rude, and probably comfort her, explaining that, no, she hadn't committed some horrible, grievous sin, she'd been annoying, "go forth and (try to) sin no more", and all that.

John, keep in mind that you can really only speak for yourself in this. I have no doubt whatsoever that several of the commenters here, if given the opportunity to discuss this situation directly with the clerk, would in fact not be sympathetic and comforting.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

True.

I suppose I was making an assumption of an equivalent situation to this one, where the people discussing it have some level of at least kinda-friendly interest in the person in question.

And, even that might not be enough; I've known more than a few people who think that "gentle remonstration" means there's less than a pint of blood loss, and actual complaints are when they get *nasty* about it.

What I was trying to express is that no one is attacking a *PERSON* here. There isn't a living, breathing, feeling human being who is being pounded on here; there's an image in people's mind formed by what you've related. And, that's a very shallow image; there's very little that's known about it, for real.

And... while it can hurt to see this "imaginary person" being beaten up, and thinking of it all as being real, it's not real, and it's frequently better to assume that things would be different if it *was* real... at least until you know they wouldn't be.

Because, otherwise, the conversation has too much risk of being "about" this person we know nothing about, and diverts attention from the actual problem, which is people being cluelessly (or even not-cluelessly) rude.

And, hell, never mind. My thoughts are getting harder to express, and if I haven't made the point I was trying to make, more words aren't going to make my point any clearer. I think I'm going to drop out of this discussion, rather than risk digging myself in any deeper.

[redbird]

What the professor should have done--which I think you realize, but I want to reiterate--is treat your friend the same way he treated everyone else in the class.

And the towel attendant should have greeted Rivka the same way he greets other gym members. If he wanted to ask her for advice about disability, well, he probably should have found someone he actually knows, not intruded on a stranger during her probably-limited workout time. Failing that, "Excuse me, but if you have a few minutes on your way out, I'd like to ask your advice" would have been a better opening than to make a big deal about how Rivka actually made it to the gym.

Because the only valid predicter of who will or won't stick to an exercise program is travel time: people who live within (I think this is the number) 12 minutes' travel of their gym are much more likely to keep going than those who live further away. Nothing else--age, gender, disability, good intentions, class, nothing--correlated meaningfully.