DING! DING! DING! Here we go again!

[Jester]

So tonight I was on the phone with Nurse Betty, as I am pretty much every day and/or night. And she was relating to me some training they had today involving perceptions and how we deal with others around us.

So naturally she had to put me through this theoretical scenario and get my answers to how I would react. And she told me, naturally, that there were no wrong answers. And then she went about arguing with me about my answers. Doing everything she could to steer me to other answers, pointing this out, pointing that out, etc. Even though I was using my real world experience in this scenario (and in this case, I have experiences she does not, which makes me better able to gauge and react to said scenario), she continued to try to "push" me towards other answers.

We finally got off of that (I thought) and she starts asking me questions that no guy in his right mind wants to be asked, let alone answer. Like, "What part of my body don't you like? What would you change about me?" You know....The questions that beg Answers of Certain Male Doom. Once again, she was not happy with my answers. Not because she didn't like the answers themselves, but because they did not fit in with her idea of how the answers should be. She was looking for A or B, and I answered her, quite honestly, M=2V/P.

So now, it is getting late, and I want to get some sleep. I clearly state this to her, attempting to get off the phone with her. Knowing how she is, I know this will take a few minutes. By "a few" I thought 5-10. I did not expect she would continue to drag things out for thirty more freakin' minutes. But that is not my chief complaint about how the conversation ended.

No, it most certainly is not. Because, my young friends, what did she do once I stated my desire to get to sleep so I can wake up, do my morning bicycle ride (which I have not done the last two mornings), and go to work to be a productive and able employee of my company? She said, "I didn't really like your answers" to the theoretical scenario. In other words, my answers were wrong....to a scenario that had "no wrong answers."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Why, why, WHY do I only get involved with women who are completely and irretrievably insane? Oh, wait, I remember....because ALL women are insane. I just happen to have an innate ability to pick the cream of the crop!

So yeah, Fight #4 is in the books, and is by far the weirdest, most bizarre, and illogical fight to date.

Somebody please shoot me.

[RootedPhoenix]

Why did she say there was no wrong answer when there was a wrong answer?!
There's just some reasoning I do not follow. Oy. >_<

[Jester]

Reasoning and logic apparently have no home here.

And please don't ask me "why." I cannot explain the rationale, if there is any, behind what this woman says. Seriously. I can't.

[iradney]

Problem is, you also can't turn around and say to her "but you said there were NO WRONG ANSWERS!!! WTF" coz then she'll blow up like Mt Vesuvius...

Unfortunately, some women like to "trap" their SOs by saying "Oh, there are NO wrong answers" and then proceed to eviscerate said SO

[Jester]

Actually, that is exactly what I said to her, Rads! And she insisted that she wasn't being illogical, that she had not said I had given wrong answers, etc. She just didn't like the answers I gave. Yada yada yada. Hilarious. NOT!

[iradney]

She has a point there Jester. Just because the answer isn't wrong, doesn't mean you have to like it...

[the_std]

You are rolling in the crazy, my friend. I thought I would be able to look at it with more understanding after a good night's sleep, but it just makes less sense than ever.

[Shards]

At this point Jester has me curious what the scenario was...

[AdminAssistant]

"Women are crazy and men are stupid. And the main reason that women are crazy is that men are stupid." - George Carlin

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

At this point Jester has me curious what the scenario was...

Me too. More information please! Crazed minds want to know.

[Rapscallion]

The more I read tales such as this, the more I wonder why women keep trying to persuade me that romance (never, ever with them) is a good idea.

Ah. Sadism. That would explain it.

Rapscallion

[seigus]

Jester, there is a website called "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About" that is just freakin' hysterical. You might enjoy it under the circumstances.

http://www.mil-millington.com/

[Broomjockey]

Ah. Sadism. That would explain it.

Rapscallion

I'm on your side, Raps. I'm staying clear of it all, and enjoying the tales from the sidelines

[Jack T. Chance]

So tonight I was on the phone with Nurse Betty, as I am pretty much every day and/or night. And she was relating to me some training they had today involving perceptions and how we deal with others around us.

So naturally she had to put me through this theoretical scenario and get my answers to how I would react. And she told me, naturally, that there were no wrong answers. And then she went about arguing with me about my answers. Doing everything she could to steer me to other answers, pointing this out, pointing that out, etc. Even though I was using my real world experience in this scenario (and in this case, I have experiences she does not, which makes me better able to gauge and react to said scenario), she continued to try to "push" me towards other answers.

We finally got off of that (I thought) and she starts asking me questions that no guy in his right mind wants to be asked, let alone answer. Like, "What part of my body don't you like? What would you change about me?" You know....The questions that beg Answers of Certain Male Doom. Once again, she was not happy with my answers. Not because she didn't like the answers themselves, but because they did not fit in with her idea of how the answers should be. She was looking for A or B, and I answered her, quite honestly, M=2V/P.

So now, it is getting late, and I want to get some sleep. I clearly state this to her, attempting to get off the phone with her. Knowing how she is, I know this will take a few minutes. By "a few" I thought 5-10. I did not expect she would continue to drag things out for thirty more freakin' minutes. But that is not my chief complaint about how the conversation ended.

No, it most certainly is not. Because, my young friends, what did she do once I stated my desire to get to sleep so I can wake up, do my morning bicycle ride (which I have not done the last two mornings), and go to work to be a productive and able employee of my company? She said, "I didn't really like your answers" to the theoretical scenario. In other words, my answers were wrong....to a scenario that had "no wrong answers."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Why, why, WHY do I only get involved with women who are completely and irretrievably insane? Oh, wait, I remember....because ALL women are insane. I just happen to have an innate ability to pick the cream of the crop!

So yeah, Fight #4 is in the books, and is by far the weirdest, most bizarre, and illogical fight to date.

Jester, your story reminds me of a great little song by SR-71. Ironically enough, the name of the song is "Here We Go Again"!

Somebody please shoot me.

Well, only since you asked...

I'll make this as painless as possible...

*sets phaser to full power*

[Jester]

"Women are crazy and men are stupid. And the main reason that women are crazy is that men are stupid." - George Carlin

"The Universal Law of the Sexes states that all men are stupid, all women are insane, and there are NO exceptions." --Jester....for about the last 10 years or so.

Jester, there is a website called "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About" that is just freakin' hysterical.

I have been there, read the whole thing, and is on his mailing list, actually. But thanks for the thought!

At this point Jester has me curious what the scenario was...

Okay. You are enjoying your morning. You are getting on a train with the morning paper and a delicious cup of coffee. Everything is good. (I ignored the fact that I don't drink coffee, and mentally just adjusted it to "a lovely cold quart of Gatorade," which is more my style. I completely ignored the fact that I don't live within a hundred miles of a train....) While reading the paper on the train and enjoying your coffee Gatorade, you notice a man and five children board. The man sits down, basically ignoring the children. The kids are hellions, running about, causing trouble, trashing the train car, spilling your coffee/Gatorade/morning cup of mead/whatever, wrecking your paper, and generally driving everyone on the train nuts. You look at the man who came on with the kids, and see that he is oblivious to the mayhem, and seems to be ignoring everything. You approach him and inform him that his kids are running wild, and that he really should do something about them. "Yes, I know I should. I just don't know what to do. We just left the hospital, where my wife, their mother, died. I am at a loss. She was my whole life."

What do you do?

That was the scenario. The idea is that first you are asked what you do in regards to the kids, and most people say that they would approach the man and tell him to take some action. Or if they don't, they are asked what they think of the man. Bad parent? Idiot? Asshole? Clueless? What? Either way, once they state their opinion, they are THEN informed of the situation, i.e., the death of the wife and mother. The idea here is, I guess, that it is easy to react to a situation, but sometimes it is better to step back and check your feelings and find out WHY the situation is as it is.

Nurse Betty did not like the fact that I stood by my ground and said that, yes, the situation sucks, but the kids are still running wild, and the man should really do something about it. Fact is, if they are running wild, he is still a bad parent, even if he is in a daze. She did not like the fact that I would not (as she thought I would) gather the kids up and do some magic for them to try to help them through this trying time.

It is easy for Nurse Betty to make such snap judgments. She has all four of her parents (mom and stepdad, dad and stepmom) alive and well and gets on pretty well with them. So she has no idea what it is like to lose a parent. *I*, on the other hand, know exactly what it is like, as my father died in 1981, when I was but a lad of 10. I know the shock and grief that that causes. I know that my sisters and I, however good or bad we were, would never have run roughshod over the train car, as Mom and Dad raised us better than that. I also know that, at least for me, when Dad died, I was not only in shock, but I really just wanted the world to go away. Some stranger trying to do magic for me would have gotten at best a distant glazed stare, at worst a complete ignoring, as frankly, being amazed by some card tricks or laughing at some stupid jokes were NOT what I wanted to do. Frankly, I would have wanted the magician, and perhaps the whole world, to die in a nuclear blast or a supernova.

So no, in that situation, I would not have played Super Nanny and whipped the kids into shape with my amazing entertainment skills. I wouldn't have even tried. Sorry, but there are times when my act is completely inappropriate, and this wouyld be one of them.

When I told Nurse Betty all this, she basically brushed off my comments, saying it "didn't count" because it would have been my MOTHER, not my FATHER, on that train. My response: "Say what?" Seriously, why would it matter if it were my Mom or Dad sitting there in a daze letting us run around like hellions? What difference does it make? Mom DID lose everything, Dad WAS her whole life (along with us), and now she had to find her way in a world where she had not worked in decades, had three young children, and her partner, husband, lover, friend, and provider was gone. But according to Nurse Betty, this would be "different" and wasn't "the point" of the exercise.

Poppycock. Horse pucky. Bullshit.

The point of the exercise, as far as I could tell, was to realize that your original perception was in error, and to come to the conclusion that maybe the dude wasn't such a bad guy or parent, but was just dealing with a horrible situation. In other words, thing are not always what we originally perceive them as. That's all fine and dandy, but considering I had originally been told by NB that there were "no wrong answers," it seemed fairly evident that MY answers were wrong, as they did not meet the preconceived notions of what a person should do in this theoretical situation.

Nor did she want to listen to my logical and realistic argument that people will SAY they will do one thing when presented with a hypothetical situation, but in reality, often do something completely different, and the fact of the matter is, I don't KNOW what I would do in such a situation. Chances are good that I would curse all six of the family under my breath, gather up my things, and bail from that car, to find refuge in another train car away from the carnage and chaos. Naturally, that was not an acceptable answer to the scenario either. Even once I told her that of course things are not always as they appear--my life in general and my experience as a magician has shown me that time and again. Of course, I was scolded that this scenario "is not the same as a magic trick." Well, not exactly. But they have many similarities, such as not being what they initially appear to the average person's eye, and having something going on beyond what was initially suspected. Etc., etc., etc.

I am an opinionated and obstinate person. I am also very direct, and when presented with a theoretical situation, I will try to think how I would actually react, but I know myself enough to know that my initial interpretation is probably right....I DO react, and I don't always bother to find out what the underlying reason for the situation is. Frankly, most of the time, I don't think it matters what is causing the shit....the shit is still shit. Humans are fucked. And 95% of the time, that dude on the train, dead wife or not, is going to be a gigantic walking turd of a parent, and I would have been right all along to think so. But my "inability" to step back and reassess the situation and see it in a different way was "disappointing" to her.

Despite, of course, the fact that there were "no wrong answers."

Insanity, thou art woman!