50 Times People Tried Correcting The Wrong Person And Failed Miserably

I run a small business. I was struggling and lost a key employee... made a call for help and brought my dad in on the business. We shall call him Steve.


Steve is still part of the team now, about 2 years later. He has 3 people reporting to him and he runs a tight ship. One of his team members came to me the other day.


"I don't know if you know this, but working for Steve can be hard. He is very demanding and sets extremely h**h expectations."


... you sweet summer child, would you like to go back in time and meet my 15 year old self?

I work in software. I had a client during a meeting where they were beating up on my company stress with absolute confidence that our software couldn’t do some given thing. I gently let him know that it did do that. He literally shouted that it did not. He knows this software, he’s been using it for the past three years and it has never done the thing.

I immediately hit share on my screen, showed him the setting that turns it on (the setting whose name and description I wrote eight years ago), turned it on, and clicked through all the buttons that I had personally designed in the given release in 2016 or whatever it was, and asked him if he had any questions. He did not unmute his microphone.

One of the QA guys at the factory I work at was out sick, so I got sent in to help out for the day. The remaining QA person insisted on "training me" and took something like 5 minutes explaining what inspection points to look at before he took a breath, just enough time for me to say "you know I'm the one who wrote the QA book, right?".

I hadn’t played Magic: the Gathering for decades and asked a friend’s kid to teach me the new rules (no interrupts now?) including Commander. He gave me a simple control deck.

I looked at my first hand and my old brain creaked awake. This card lets me draw an extra card every turn for one life, and I have forty life? My old brain whispered “card advantage” to me and I proceeded to lock down the table.

I was the head judge for the French national championship in 1994 and judged the semi-final of the first World Championships. I was the first lvl3 judge in Europe and worked for WotC UK from 1993-1998. I was literally there when the deep magic was written.

My newly moved out 24 year-old telling me groceries are expensive.

I cited the deep magic.

I was probably about 8 at the time. I had just learned how to play chess. My father was getting a degree in comp-sci and we were visiting his uni- supervisor. There was a chessboard so I “explained” the rules of chess to his supervisor.

His supervisor was some level of grandmaster, and was actively designing a computer program that took on and tied Gary Kasparov iirc. He later “solved” checkers and chess iirc.

He was very good natured about it, and absolutely waxed 8 year old me in chess.

"I bet grandma never took your phone away."


I was born in '74. I didn't see my first mobile phone until my late teens and it was a 20lb brick with a shoulder strap. .

When my 13yr old cousin asked if I even knew what a meme was. Like look here you little f**k I've been on the internet since Newgrounds, don't you dare talk to me about memes.

About 6 years ago, my daughter told me 'Panic at the Disco we're the first ones to bring theatricality to rock music'.
You sweet summer child.

Had a service running at work. Someone said something like 'We don't want to mess with that service, it was written before any of us got here, and no one knows how it works'

::raises hand::

"Uhh, I wrote that. I still have the code. It's probably due for a rewrite anyway.".

I'm a lobbyist - I, and an elderly colleague were in a meeting with Congressional committee staff. We were having a spirited discussion about what a provision of a decades old law actually meant. I was doing most of the arguing on our side.

Eventually, I directly informed the staffer that this was not a debate and that we were correct. When she asked me how I could possibly have that level of certainty, I turned the conversation over to my colleague. I got to watch as he informed her, as I already knew, that he was sure about the provision because **he wrote it.** When he was a staffer for that very committee. In 1962.


Delicious.

When I was in grad school, I wrote a Wikipedia article on a species I was coauthoring a paper on. I also did a class project in genetics on the same species, which wasn't related to the publication.


I got fine marks on the class paper, but the professor chided me for not describing all the interesting things known about the species for background. He told me I could start by just "reading the Wikipedia article." .

For me, it was happening upon a video game booth at a South Florida flea market about 15 years ago.

Two early teen boys were playing Golden Eye multiplayer. I stopped to watch for a bit before the owner offered up a third controller.

The two kids grinned and stage whispered plans to g**g up in me.

What they weren't ready for was my 006 playing a*s to run literal circles around them, firing the entire time, shooting ammo crates away from their initial start points, and my detailed knowledge of the layout of The Stacks.

After the 10th k**l, they both just gave up and left.

I honestly don’t know if this fits the question perfectly….

Years ago I was in the “mall” in Elizabeth City, NC, in one of the corner stores and the Eurythmics song “Sweet Dreams” was being piped over the stores sound system. I overheard a couple teenagers near me loudly saying, “What the f**k, man? They stole this from Marylin!”.

I had a young molecular biologist say to me once, "Can you imagine what it was like doing this stuff before PCR was invented?" I had to break it to him that I not only remembered that time, I spent a very long day as the escort for the a*****e who invented it.

The kid looked at me as if I told him I remembered when the wheel was invented.

I went into a meeting at work about some kind of problem our software development team was having and a somewhat new young cocky developer started explaining what the problem was, how things are supposed to work, etc. I'm the most senior person in the room, but not a software developer per se as I'm more of a people and project manager at that point.

He starts describing the system our software interfaces with, and says something not quite right about it. I tried to very gently correct him, going out of my way to avoid saying 'you're wrong' and keep the story/explanation coming. He responds kind of dismissively and briskly explains why I'm wrong.

I now start to see his misunderstanding is important to the issue he's having. I say a little more strongly that "I'm pretty sure that system behaves like 'this' and expects you to do 'that' and... he cuts me off. This time he's a little more condescending and brushes off my input as he confidently pulls out a big document about that system. I guess to show me he's done his homework. I recognize this document. I'm very familiar with it (though most in the room are probably not.)

I respond by saying "I think if you look at this part of that document, you'll see..." He cuts me off, tells me he knows what it says and how it is supposed to work. Then I ask him if he knows who wrote that manual. He does not.

Someone else in the room (that knew me better) asks if I wrote it. I say yes. In fact, I didn't just create that document. I also designed the whole system and wrote all the software that was the subject of that manual. This was done 5-7 years earlier, when I was in a completely different party of the company.

We continued on with the meeting and it gradually became clear to him and everyone that his misunderstanding of my old system (and how his software was supposed to work with it) was the core part of the problem he was having, and it ended up being a productive meeting.

If something has been in place that long, and it's called from a thousand different places, maybe don't assume it is the problem. I think he gained a little respect and humbleness toward us all that day.

I'm 33. A 10-year-old mentioned Pikachu in conversation and then backtracked and started trying to explain what Pokemon is.

My nephew, with all the condescension of a 6-year-old: "there's this movie. You probably haven't heard of it. It's called Aladdin..."


Me:"DID YOU WAKE ME UP? DID YOU RUB MY LAMP?"


(I happened to be in the US in fall of '93, when Aladdin came out on tape).

My kid tried to explain to me that you could make a smiley face by typing “:)”.

When my 19 year old colleague started discussing this new film franchise he'd found to me (41F) and explained it used to be a TV show on something called MTV.

The franchise he was talking about was Jacka*s.