Saturday 11 February 2012

The Right to Demand Respect.

The title of this blog is an irony. No one can demand respect, you have to earn it. My Dad passed down some words of wisdom that his father passed down to him once. "You can take a lifetime to build respect, and only few seconds to destroy it" The advice didn't go any further which was the best part, cause it didn't tell me what do to keep it, if I should behave or act a certain way or to dodge those seconds. This is always been true, and my fastest frame of reference is the Rachel Wik fiasco. This week someone demanded respect, not gonna mention the persons name, but if you know the guy should be pretty apparent.

Gandhi said there was two types of discrimination in India, one against Indians and one against women. Unfortunately he missed one. This discrimination is against the in-laws on the women's side. So a bit of background...all flows with the drowy system where a guy's family feels entitled to the fucking every bit of what the girls family owns. The story now then goes, a buddy's brother in law asked me for a copy of MS office for Mac. I said OK, I didn't have internet for a while, then my drive with the file was with someone else for a while. Anyways took me a month to get it to him in its entirety. I kept getting repeat messages that he need it. During one of those message, I replied saying, I have priorities, this is not one of them, a new copy is $100. My intent was to say, "Hey...I can't get this to you, in case you gotta a assignment or something due" But it was taken as an insult to honour.  I implied that he was cheap (this guy took 3 hours to decide if he was ready to spend $1 on angry birds, after loving the trial, and this somehow implied he was cheap). He wrote me a really angry email, calling me a, "little person, rude, disrespectful, and noxious and that I may never contact his family again for any reason." He also cc my buddy who couldn't careless, and his father in law on this message expecting something hard to be taken care off, as he has just demanded respect cause he married a daughter of the house. Now, this guy is a special case..I couldn't ever picture anyone getting there father in law involved in some soo petty and soo small. No matter how shallow the culture gets at its core.

I had a great time laughing my ass off with his with my co-workers in the morning. But my room-mate had some very exciting thought that kind of justified this. Its very very petty, but he believed being in the mid-thirties and living with a family on student loans leaves a man very insecure, always on edge so this should be very expected. Bit of migration on a gold digging, and then struggling to get into school...all that has to be very very tough on anyone. It made me realize that age is still a number, this is petty to me cause I am mature beyond it, and I guess some people don't make that post adolescent leap till they are forty. All in all, great entertainment.

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