He was the one who turned up for the school trip in the jeans that were so blue they were blinding. He’d pick a band out of the Top 10 at random, and mention them in every single class, using badly out of date slang:
“Hey Groovy Cats! Have you heard the new (generic band) CD? It’s totally bad and radical! It’s got a groovy beat!”
(I’ve even heard one describe something as (shudder) ‘Totally Tubular!’)
He was the teacher who tried to fit in. He was always trying to ‘get down with the kids’…and always managed to get it completely wrong. He was always 6 months late on every ‘new’ saying, trend or style.
He thought everyone loved him, and everyone did…but only because he was so much fun to laugh at. He thought he was a comedian, but everyone else knew he was a clown.
I got thinking about this thanks to a show on HGTV that Sunny was watching yesterday. I don’t know the name of the show, but the premise is that a few people with simply gigantic egos come into your house, tell you your stuff’s crap, make you sell it, and then use the money to redecorate your house. They then suck each other off about how great a job they did…while the shell-shocked home owners silently start working out how much it’s going to cost them to put their mess right.
Anyway, one of the hosts was doing his best to ‘get down with the kids’:
“Hey, dudes!”
Steeeeeyuurike ONE!
“Hey! Is that a Nintendo Playstation?”
Steeeeeeyurike TWO!
Ok, anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the past 5 years know that Sony made the Playstation, but fair enough, if you’re not a gamer, I can understand the mistake.
(As a side note, one thing that really pisses me off is the people who use the word ‘Playstation’ as a generic term for console…and if you correct them, they wave their hands and say “Oh, it’s the same thing!”…Yeah, I’ll remind you of that when I compliment you on your ‘Ford Viper’, your ‘Dodge Mustang’, or call your Rolex a Casio).
Anyway, the kid looked at him like he’d grown an extra head:
“Uh, it’s a Gamecube.”
Now, the pillock could have retained just a little bit of his ‘street cred’ (another word used only by these people while ‘gettin’ down with the kids’) By either:
- Keeping quiet
- Saying something along the lines of “Oh, my mistake.”
- Admitting defeat, and admitting he doesn’t know the difference.
However, these people aren’t just trying to fool everyone into thinking they’re ‘down with the kids’, they’re trying to fool themselves. So he went for hidden option ‘d’:
- Make a wild stab in the dark, in the hope of maintaining the illusion
He swings!
“Oh, the new stuff, huh?”
…and misses. Strike three! Tough luck pal, game over, go hit the showers.
Ok, so let’s recount:
- He calls the Nintendo Gamecube and Nintendo Playstation
- He then attempts to mask his mistake by calling the Gamecube ‘New stuff’. Hate to tell him this, but what he’s calling ‘new stuff’, is a whole generation old. Oh, and the Gamecube came out at roughly the same time as the new Playstation.
Ok, I’ll admit that this is pretty much geek knowledge, and if you’re not part of the gamer community, you probably either don’t know or don’t care about who made which console or what came out first.
My point isn’t that this guy doesn’t know about consoles. My point is that this guy is trying to pass himself off as a gamer to a kid, when he probably has never held a controller in his entire life.
Above all, my point is:
If you don’t know about something, don’t pretend you do in order to fit in or to act cool. You’re being a poser, and the one thing all posers have in common, whether you’re alleged field of expertise is games, music or cars, is that the real thing can spot you a mile away.
For example, I know precisely dick about cars. I know where to put the gas, where to top up the oil, washer and radiator fluid, but that’s it. My stepsons know pretty much everything there is to know about cars, so in a car based conversation, I keep quiet. If asked my opinion on something, I say “I don’t know, I don’t really know anything about cars.”
The result is, my stepsons think “Oh, Paul doesn’t really know anything about cars.”
On the other hand I could say: “Uh, yeah! Carburetors, you need some of those. Oh, and you need to have a gap in your spark plugs. How many RPM’s does your car have? Mine’s got lots!”
The result of that would be: “Hmm, Paul knows absolutely nothing about cars, but he’s trying to pretend he does. What a complete dick.”
Posers! Just say “I don’t know.”
2 comments:
I don't know.
Posers must die.
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