Why is it always the old ladies that are the sexist ones?

[tovasshi.livejournal.com]

*Phone call*

ME: "Hi, ***** speaking, how may I help you?"
BT: "OH, hi can I talk to someone about printers."
ME: *cheerful* "That would be me."
BT: "Uh, um, okay, you probably wont have any idea as to what I'm talking about. I need to talk to someone who knows about printers."
ME: "I'm the technology associate..."
BT: "Well, you see.. *(goes on to explain about how the tubes connecting the ink to the print head are clogged)*. So I need to buy that part."
ME: "We don't sell printer parts."
BT: "Yes you do. Uh, see I know you are trying to be helpful sweety, but you don't know what you're talking about. I need to talk to someone who knows about printers."
ME: *frustrated* "You can call back later to talk to *Male guy's name* and ask him."
BT: "OH! Okay, yes I'll wait for him."

*20 min later*

*ring*
Me: "Hi, ***** speaking, how may I help you?"
BT: "Hi Can I speak to *Male guy's name*?"
ME: "He's busy, would you like to talk to *other female who know just as much as him, if not more*.."
BT: *snaps before I can finish* "NO! I don't want to talk to her. I'll wait for *Male guy's name*"

MG: "Hi, *Male guy's name*..."
...
MG: *spends half an hour explaining how we don't sell printer parts*


She seriously put in all the emphasis on our genders.

Comments

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

Why'd you recommend her to another associate? No is still no, regardless of the genitalia of the informer. :P

[tovasshi.livejournal.com]

So he could basically make her look like an ass.

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

I guess. I woulda shut her down, but that's just me. =)

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

A woman I know used to have her cow-orkers trained. She'd send a person like that over to a male cow-orker, who would find out a few details, and then say "I'm sorry, that's way too complicated for me, let me pass you over to our subject matter expert", and then would pass it back to Jenny.

[museology.livejournal.com]

That is genius.

[kallell.livejournal.com]

I worked ina home improvment store and the housewife was the most knowledgible in plumbing, we would all do that. for the longest time the local farm and fleet only had girls in auto (and they were all considerable hot)

[onyxrising.livejournal.com]

That's brilliant. You know, I think our Kandace would make a wonderful subject matter expert for just about anything customers think requires a penis.

[canray.livejournal.com]

"That's OK, Dear, you tried your best. Please put a man on now."

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Another good one is "Well, you could speak to $malename's supervisor if you like. Yes? OK, that would be me."

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

“I will get a male tech, if and only if you will go and get a male to talk to him.”
“What? That's outrageous! I—”
“Madam, if I'm too stupid to be asked the question because of my genitals, then you're too stupid to understand the answer.”

[ezerick.livejournal.com]

full of win

[bitchtude.livejournal.com]

*hands catsidhe the Gold Medal*

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

Flawlesss!

[bitchtude.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah... I've had this happen not just over the phone but to my face. Mostly though it's men not thinking a woman can be *gasp* a tech. And then they do the whole wanting to talk to male tech cause they don't believe my answer, LOL!

[falnfenix]

i get this from our female docs...many of them have this belief that if THEY can be doctors, so can i, and they're insulted that i'm not working toward that goal.

they're a bunch of rude scunts.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've found it's much more older men that give me that attitude. But certainly women "of a certain generation" aren't immune to it.

[glitteringlynx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had that a lot when I was in tech support. They just assume because we're women, we can't possibly know about printers or technology b/c that's a male thing to do or something? I dunno.

[alcoholiday.livejournal.com]

Yeah no kidding... being female, 24, and a bit of a hipster-kid must mean I know nothing about computers even though I am one of 2 CMS administrators on campus and Technology Support Specialist for the entire University *headdesk*

[headcrabs.livejournal.com]

oh my GODDDDD I GET THIS SO MUCH WITH GUYS TRYING TO TALK ABOUT ~GAMING~ apparently my brain is too fucking puny and i'm too much of a moron to possibly comprehend the one thing i constantly do.

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

I love your icon and your username.

♥

~fellow girl gamer

[headcrabs.livejournal.com]

:3

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

Is the icon stealable?

Recently I've made it a point when playing Halo with the guys to change myself to the 'female' voice and shades of pink, just to be annoying. :) Also, elite, for variety.

[headcrabs.livejournal.com]

idk, it would be weird :( it was made for me as an inside joke D:

elite girls have big fingers

[pixilated-serra.livejournal.com]

i am lucky. i have an office of 130 engineers who bow to my technological prowess.

i think it would be different tho if i had customers to deal with. blue hair facial peircings AND you're a chick? ppl are like huh you know computarz?!!!!?!?! you're not just some freak delivery punk???

and then they send their clients to me and clients are all like wtf ???? but then i win for them and they are like yay we love the blue hair computer girl with big shoes! even tho we are slightly scared because we don't understand why there is spikes on her shoes!

i think it also helped there was a dude here before me and he was all like i hate users and im going to play warcraft all day and not do anything besides be rude to ppl who ask for my help!!! so the bar was set pretty low before i got here.

though when i interview ppl they always think im HR which is funny.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

blue hair facial peircings AND you're a chick?

Sounds like fair portion of the women in the CS dept where I did my undergrad.

Ironically, all the CS guys were scared of them (because girls are scary!) so they would go back to playing Starcraft, and many of the CE guys ended up dating the CS girls (there weren't many CE girls). Indeed, that was how I met my wife.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Funny, I get all of the "females are scary/females are stupid" nonsense from the mechanical engineers where I work, and none at all from the Software/electronics guys.
<-code monkeygirl

;)

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

There were too many female MechE's for that to work where I went to school. For some reason, a lot of girls went into Biomedical Engineering too. Never could figure out why it was so popular with the ladies (aside from the fact that adaptive technologies are generally interesting, but it's gender nonspecific enough that it makes no sense).

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

It's weird really. Apparently "soft" chemistry and biology-related science is "ok" for girls, whereas tough mechanics and computers aren't. It's something in the mindset we're all injected with growing up. It took me a long talking-to by my dad to even consider studying a techy science myself - it's just not in the list of options for some weird reason.

Maths, on the other hand, seems to be gender-nonspecific. The math nerds just know their calling :)

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Well, that's not always 100%... one of the girls in Biomedical Engineering that I once dated liked to restore cars and apparently now races sport bikes....

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Of course it's not, or I wouldn't be sitting here at 6PM on a Friday installing Japanese XP Pro on a laptop without CD drive...
*twiddles thumbs*
We had a class of mech students here yesterday that had quite a few girls, actually. I was surprised.

;)

[hazelite.livejournal.com]

I live in a retirement metropolis (Arizona) and I get this ALL OF THE TIME

Old fart: "Wow, I didn't know girls could be geeks"
Me: "Yeah, I know! Isn't it crazy? I heard that they can join the military and play on basketball teams now, too! Did you know that ONE IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?" Sometimes I throw in this face :O for emphasis.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

soon they'll be letting them vote own their own property and everything!

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

My wife and I are like the dynamic duo. I did a CE BS and she did a CS BS, and so our skills are like "high level/low level". She's Mac (and works in a Windows shop doing C# development), I'm Linux (and work in a Solaris shop, doing Perl and PHP development). So, it's really funny when folks come to me with Mac/Windows questions, because I am just like "I don't know. I haven't used Windows since NT4. Why don't you ask my wife?"

And then there are the endless arguments about whether languages should pass things by reference or by value by default...

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

pass by value! you want a reference? use a pointer! harrumph!

:P

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY. Now, if you want efficiency, then what you want to do is a "pass by reference copy on write", so it LOOKS like you pass by value, but don't invoke the full overhead in the case of a variable which is only read from.

Otherwise, I want it EXPLICITLY SPECIFIED, with some variety of reference operator (byref, &, etc).

The argument my wife makes is subtly different. While she agrees with us that this is the way to design a language, she is also of the opinion that you should be versed in what you are using and thus you should not get annoyed when you forget that it passes by value - then you're just being a dumbass. My counter is that languages should work correctly (ie the way I think).

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

Sadly, we keep reinforcing the stereotype here. Our engineering staff is nothing but mid-20s to early-30s white males, with one black guy, one asian guy, and one female.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the classic 80es cartoon hero teams to me :D

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

heh. I don't know that I want to find out what is formed by our powers combined. A lot of dysfunction, testosterone and disenfranchisement, I suspect.

[madradish.livejournal.com]

I read this as "Why is it always the old ladies that are the sexiest ones?"

Still grinning to myself. :)

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Oh, glad it's not just me.

Just a theory...

[greylady.livejournal.com]

They are sexist because dealing with a technologically competent woman exposes that a large segment of their whole life is essentially a lie. If they accept that you're competent, they also have to accept that they allowed themselves to be lessened and demeaned for 60-odd years "for their own good".

Which is kind of funny after all that technology was dealt with\built by their mothers and grandmothers during The Great War.

Those wacky 50s were so socially fascinating. No wonder so many women had to drug themselves insensible to deal...

Re: Just a theory...

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the guys were out fighting, and the gals sat at home doing the computing!
Crazy times, those were...

;)

[xforge.livejournal.com]

If I were "male guy" and I'd heard about what this idiot woman was doing, I'd have acted like the biggest fricking himbo in the entire Universe until the woman hung up in utter disgust and apoplexy.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Or of course, if we get one of those idiots we could always have our CIO talk to them. She'd most likely set them straight.