There’s one type of French people that I cannot stand. Those people who think they have every right to tell you that what you are doing/thinking is not right. They are nosy, pushy, and they jump to conclusions too fast and too often. They are condescending, arrogant, and just plain mean. I hate these people. And the best part? They are usually wrong in their “justification” of why you are wrong in the first place!
Sometimes this is the reason why I don’t want to go outside or downtown. I’m afraid of running into a rude Frenchie who thinks it’s perfectly ok to tell me that I am doing something “wrong” (according to them.) I wish these people would learn to just keep their mouths shut, but I know that’s not going to happen.
Some of my experiences include the woman who yelled at me for walking the dog on the SIDEWALK BACK TO MY APARTMENT because she thought that I was letting him go to the bathroom on the grass, when I had, in fact, taken him very far away to do his business. But she apparently didn’t hear/didn’t care what I had to say because she just kept repeating over and over again that dogs are not allowed on the grass and that children play there, etc. All this, while I was on the SIDEWALK! After I got back inside, I realized that she had parked in the lot for my building and she lives in the next building over, which is completely forbidden. I seriously wanted to egg her car, but I didn’t. Pas encore….
Then last week when I was waiting in a check-out line at the store, a punk teenager turns up the volume on his cell phone/mp3 player. (Why did anyone think this product would be anything more than an annoyance?) A loud woman at the back of the line goes off on him and commands him to turn it off, and then continues on about how if everyone had a cell phone that played music, on ne serait jamais tranquil and blah blah blah… She just wouldn’t stop talking. I was glad the kid turned his phone off, but I wanted to yell at the woman for being such a garce.
And two other experiences that I’ve read just in the past few days:
Poor Joy was just trying to ask a question, and a crêpe vendor treats her like an idiot.
Mlle Smith is patronized for “thinking like an American” after explaining her opinion on Sarkozy’s reluctance for Turkey to join the EU… and then informed that Turkey does not border Iraq or Iran. And people think Americans are bad at geography?
They constantly try to belittle you and convince the whole world that you are an idiot and that they know everything. But for the others who are standing nearby and have to listen to their rants… well, it makes those people look like complete jerks.
I’m definitely not saying that all French people are like this. I hate generalizing about a country’s population, such as “all Americans love hamburgers and Coke.” But it does seem that the French just don’t know when they have crossed the line sometimes…
The only good thing about their rudeness is that it’s directed at everyone, not just foreigners!
