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19 April 2007

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!!!!
I'm going to just say that word in the middle of the night as my roommates are falling asleep, and then pretend to be asleep if they ask me what I'm talking about.

Fat clips.

Depending on the situation, I'm usually more inclined to let those kinds of people know that they're incorrect/not an expert on whatever they're lecturing me on. Usually after the third strike. Saves me future annoyance. Other times, it's much more amusing/socially acceptable to do as Tacy did, and just sit there and try not to laugh. :P
posted by CitrusFreak12 19 April | 23:29
I've had really strange and bad unsolicited advice about being a foster parent.
posted by Claudia_SF 19 April | 23:38
Oh, Tacy wasn't trying not to laugh. It's hard to describe her expression, but it was a mixture of pissed off, astounded, and incredibly disdainful.
posted by Orange Swan 19 April | 23:42
What was the bad advice you got Claudia_SF?

Oh, and the cobolt blue+faux fur suit image tells me exactly how fab Tracy decked out every day. I wish I could have seen her face.
posted by dabitch 20 April | 05:31
That r had escaped from some other sentance I was writing.
posted by dabitch 20 April | 05:32
I'm learning to keep looking alert, interested, friendly, and appreciative when people who know bupkis about my life start offering tips on how to run it. It's good practice for if I ever become a CEO or a politician.
posted by PaxDigita 20 April | 08:14
Does the story come across clearer if I say that Tacy, although she did indeed have a lot going for her, always seemed to me as though she was one of those girls who were really popular in high school and never really got over it?
posted by Orange Swan 20 April | 08:56
Re bad advice I've received -- Mostly you-need-to-crack-the-whip kind of stuff. With the attitude that the speaker could come in and "fix" my foster kids ala that nanny show. Usually from people who don't have kids. Or who have really high achieving bio kids.

Someone over at Ask MeFi told me I should take my girl kid out for ice cream, and hug her and tell her how proud I was of her and how I had unconditional love for her and she would always be my daughter no matter what.

Which was just so wrong. My girl kid doesn't hug/touch, and doesn't like ice cream. And I was struggling (then) with whether I could keep her in my home because of her (very bad) behavior (about which I had somewhat foolishly posted to Ask), so "you will always be my daughter" was really off, and my girl kid would have thought such a talk was completely batty.
posted by Claudia_SF 20 April | 10:27
Orange Swan -- the story is hilarious.
posted by Claudia_SF 20 April | 10:49
Ugh. That would be hard to bear, Claudia_SF.

My parents took in foster children. Some came and went, but there were three girls who were 7, 8 and 9 when they arrived and stayed until they were grown up. My foster sisters have not turned out particularly well. None of them finished high school or got any sort of post-secondary education or job training. So they can only get crappy jobs. They all married awful men, and wound up divorced. They had 8 children between them, and although they are good mothers you can imagine what it would be like to raise children with no money and no help from the fathers. They are now in their late forties and struggle with ill health and depression. It's a real source of sadness and bitterness to my parents that despite their having poured over ten years of effort into those girls they don't feel they made much difference.

My parents also have five of their own children. We all have career or skilled jobs, we own our own homes, and no one's been divorced or in abusive relationships or on welfare.

So anyone who thought they could have done better with those girls than my parents can shove it. Or better yet, inform themselves on the realities of taking in foster care kids.
posted by Orange Swan 20 April | 12:45
one of those girls who were really popular in high school and never really got over it?

My sister once dated a guy who kept a shrine, a lovingly maintained shrine, stocked with trophies and photos and the suchlike, to his years as a high school champion wrestler. He was in his late twenties at the time.

We -- the wrestler, my sister and I -- all went to high school in a small state, with a population less than a million. And he was in one of the lowest weight classes, like 105, which is kind of sparsely populated. The competition he faced was not exactly world-class.

I was a total outcast and a loser in high school. But at least high school wasn't the peak period of my life.
posted by jason's_planet 21 April | 13:06
They are now in their late forties and struggle with ill health and depression. It's a real source of sadness and bitterness to my parents that despite their having poured over ten years of effort into those girls they don't feel they made much difference.

This reminds me of an old Jesuit to the effect that if you give us a child until the age of six, he will be ours forever.

Maybe the patterns laid down in early childhood, the messages handed down by parental example, were just too powerful to overcome.
posted by jason's_planet 21 April | 13:08
old Jesuit saying.

sorry.
posted by jason's_planet 21 April | 13:10
Yes, that could be it. They did have a horrible home before they went into foster care. And I suppose they lacked the natural resilience some people have that enables them to overcome such a thing, or worse things.

That ex-wrestler sounds like a prize;-)

I was a total outcast and a loser in high school. But at least high school wasn't the peak period of my life.


Oh me too! Isn't it great how it doesn't matter at all now?

Just as bad as the people who are still priding themselves on high school achievement/popularity are those who go on and on about how picked on and miserable they were as a high school student. Actually, I've only known one person like this, and she is a sad case. I tried to advise her to put it behind her, and oh no, I didn't know the hell she'd suffered. So I told her to tell me the worst anecdote she could remember. She did, and I topped it with a story of my own, which even she readily agreed was worse than anything she'd undergone. Then I asked her why she couldn't put her "hell" behind her when everyone else I knew had. More wailing about how I didn't understand.

And she also compalins about how the "people at work haven't moved beyond high school behaviour" and how she "worries about being popular". Sigh.

Some people really do max out at age 15, I guess.
posted by Orange Swan 22 April | 09:18
Oh, yeah. Adulthood is the time for geeks to shine.

Just as bad as the people who are still priding themselves on high school achievement/popularity are those who go on and on about how picked on and miserable they were as a high school student.


That's an inverted form of narcissism. Instead of "I am great because I was on the top of the high school heap" you get "I am noble/special/important because I was at the bottom of the high school heap."

Not much difference, there.
posted by jason's_planet 22 April | 09:50
This makes me sad and angry || An ugly landlord/tenant dispute caught on video

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