Let me 'splain...

There was an inclement weather alert yesterday in the District They Call Columbia, warning of freezing rain and the dreaded wintery mix starting mid-afternoon. This caused a good number of people to bail out of work early so they could get home before the onslaught. I was one of the evacuees, because I know I don’t know how to drive in snow or ice, and I also know that most of the people in Virginia don’t know how to drive in it.

Unfortunately, one of my colleagues, who also goes to the end of the Silver Line, caught up with me, and for the entire 50-minute commute I had to listen to him mansplain the company’s organization, product management, artificial intelligence and his shifting role in various tech departments.

This colleague is not what you would call particularly aware—it never occurs to him to ask about what someone else is doing, except as a springboard for him to return the conversation to him. I know this, so I try to limit my interaction with him. When it’s unavoidable I just ask a few questions, nod and say, “Right” a lot.

But yesterday on the Metro, it was just painful. Yap, yap, yap, organization; yap, yap, yap, product management; yap, yap, yap, managing developers. His understanding of the organization is limited; that of product management non-existent (and, surprisingly, his grasp of AI is tenuous); and I don’t really give a toss about him managing developers. (Interesting, though, that they don’t seem to be overjoyed at the prospect, and it doesn’t seem to occur to him to make any moves to remediate that situation.)

I’ve been particularly disinclined to listen to his claptrap about product management since the time he told me, “We don’t need product management on [communication and collaboration platform that is God-awful precisely because there was no product manager involved in it at any point in its conception, design, building or maintenance] because we’ve got a project manager, a UX designer and I’m the technical director.”

But all the way home yesterday, he expatiated on stuff he knows nothing about, completely confident that I’d have nothing at all to add. It's occasions like these that prove the Theory of Relativity, because that 50 minutes felt like a day and a half.

This reminded me of someone I used to know, a Navy photographer and videographer. I learned a lot from about photography, and I really valued his expertise. But he just could not stick the idea that I, too, might have some understanding of things on my own account. Very often I’d turn around to find him cutting down something I’d said, and explaining how I must be wrong.

For example: I was telling him once about staying at the Rittenhouse Hotel, in Philadelphia, a luxury property by anyone’s standards. And I marveled that it cost $265 a night (which 20 years ago was big bucks). He shook his head and said I couldn’t possibly have paid that much because—and he pointed to the rate notice on the inside door of his Best Western room—“It says this much, but that’s not what I’m paying.”

Great non sequitur, dude, but I think I know what charge appeared on my credit card bill.

Then, he was going to come out to visit me when I lived in Oakton, and I sent him directions. (This was before the Internet, and before mobile phones; primitive, I know.) I told him to go out I-66, exit at Nutley, and follow directions to my place off Jermantown. He told me, “I think you’re wrong. My map doesn’t show I-66 going out that far.”

Dude—your map is from 15 years before the 90s; I-66 has been extended since then. How ‘bout you give me credit for knowing how to get home?

And one more: I told him where I lived in Reston, and that I used to walk around the edge of the golf course. He insisted that I couldn’t live there and walk around the golf course because the golf course was on the other side of the Toll Road.

Right—I regularly hallucinate, don’t I? It couldn’t possibly be that there are two golf courses in this town, and that I actually do know where I’m walking, could it?

That was the point at which I just quit talking with him.

I don’t know what it is about men’s egos, and why they’re so heavily invested in plumping them up, at the expense of their credibility, their dignity and their chances of making the kind of impression I’m guessing they’re hoping for. But I wish we’d get past this lemme-‘splain-that-to-you-little-lady condescending shite—especially when you’re talking out your ass—because I find that as I grow older I just don’t have the bandwidth for putting up with it.

And I hope to God I don’t end up in a Metro car with my colleague again, because I might be tempted to throw myself under the train. Or him.