Speaking of advice that sucks.... Ever get really irritated by someone who gives you advice that is not only unsolicited but that is so spectacularly bad that you just wonder how they couldn’t possibly have known better? I used to work with a woman who specialized in this sort of advice giving. She drove me — and the entire team we were on — absolutely mad, but there was one time when her advice giving afforded me endless amusement, and does to this day, nine years on. Hell, when I’m ninety I’ll still find this funny.→[More:]

First, a little background info.

Back when I was 24, “Babs” was one of my co-workers on a project team. I don’t know exactly how old she was, but my best guess is she was somewhere in her late thirties. So not old, but she came across as much older than that. She was very fussy and frumpy. And as set in her ways as an octogenarian mule. She always thought she was right about everything. If the entire team disagreed with her about something, she would insist that we were all wrong and she was right. This did not do wonders for her work performance, as you can imagine, because she would not take direction and could not learn how to apply rules. She also worked incredibly slowly. She was disastrously bad at everything she was given to do. The senior project leader eventually just had her do straight inputting that was ordinarily done programmatically because otherwise she was simply making too much clean up for him. The only reason Babs was not terminated was that our manager (the worst manager I ever had, but that was another story) did not have the heart to fire her – the manager said this me herself. And yet Babs would lecture us all on how to properly do our work and order every detail our lives.

Here’s an example of just how stubborn and misguided she was. We were talking about doing our tax returns, and I mentioned that I had to get a tax receipt from my landlord so I could claim my rent. She said to me, “Oh no, [Swannie] you can’t claim rent.” I said of course I could. She said no, I couldn’t, and I mustn’t claim rent because I was going to get in trouble.

I said, “Babs. Not everyone can claim rent because it depends on what your income and rent levels are, but I can, and all my friends claim rent. Every tax preparer I have ever used in the six years I have been paying rent, from my parents’ accountant to the H&R block employees to the CGA I now use, has claimed rent for me. And I got reviewed for the year I was nineteen and Revenue Canada had no fault to find with my taxes.”

Babs said, “Well, maybe they didn’t look at your forms carefully enough.”

What do you say to someone who, despite having zero training in accounting, thinks she knows tax exemptions better than Revenue Canada?

This was just irritating. But to get to the incident I found hilarious…

One day Babs and I and another co-worker, “Tacy” were talking about, um, “female stuff” – specifically, how we found our clothes didn’t fit during that certain phase of the moon.

Let me tell you a little about Tacy so you’ll understand the story better. Tacy was then 22, very attractive, and quite the glamour puss. She lived in three-inch heels (I think I’d worked with her for over a year before I realized I was taller than her rather than shorter), and habitually came to work dressed as though she was going clubbing immediately after. Everything she owned was fitted and/or clingy. Her one suit was cobalt blue and trimmed with white faux fur.

So. There we were, Babs, Tacy, and me, talking about not fitting into our clothes at times. Tacy said she dealt with it by having a few outfits in a larger size. I said I avoided my less forgiving clothes and wore something with a bit of stretch to it. At this point Babs told us SHE had a much better solution, and proceeded to tell us what that was. We should get ourselves a pair of trousers like the ones she was wearing. Which happened to be a pair of navy, polyester, pleat-front, perma-creased pants with metal clips at the waistband. (Which, incidentally, Babs had somehow managed to buy in several inches too short though she was only 5’1”.) Babs extolled the virtues of these trousers and demonstrated how these fat clips could be adjusted to allow for weight loss and gain. She told us we really should get ourselves some – and further urged that we get ourselves several pairs as she had, in colours like black, navy, brown, and dark green. In case you don’t have a mental picture of these trousers by now, I’ll just say that they were frumpy, dowdy and unflattering in the extreme, straight out of the Sears back catalogue, and in general the kind of thing that no young woman would ever voluntarily wear.

If Babs had just said this to me, I would have just been annoyed at her complete cluelessness. I was 24, and as I made much less money than Tacy and lived on my own rather than rent-free with my parents as Tacy did, I was buying most of my clothes at thrift shops. I was hardly a fashion plate but I cared about style. You would have had to put a gun to my head to get me into pair of those trousers. You would still have to do so now that I’m 33. My 68-year-old mother might wear something like them around home, but never out in public, and she’d certainly never dream of trying to get her thirtysomething daughters or twentysomething and teenaged granddaughters to wear them.

But since Babs was also doing her rhapsodic fat pants sermon for Tacy’s benefit, I enjoyed it. Although Tacy was polite and only said “Umm-hmm,” the look on her face was one of the most hilarious facial expressions I have ever seen.

I’ve told a number of my former co-workers (all ages, both male and female) who knew Tacy about this, and they all laughed hysterically at the mere idea of anyone trying to tell Tacy to get polyester pants with fat clips and said they wished they’d been there. You don’t know Tacy and weren’t there, but I’m hoping you can understand why I’d find this so funny.

Although maybe it’s just funny because the phrase “fat clips” is intrinsically funny. Fat clips. FatclipsFat clipsFatclips. FAT CLIPS!!!!