Earlier this year, I had a notable experience in a workplace
situation.
One of the other workers in the office was a girl in her late 20s,
smoking hot. She started smiling at me, waving to me, saying "Hi" in
a breathless voice when we passed in the hall. And she was quite open
about it, smiling and waving when there were other people around.
(All of the people but me were in their 30s and 40s.)
This was causing a big problem for me. My hormones were telling me
one thing, and my mind was telling me something quite different --
that she was playing a game of "Rapo" -- trying to get me to ask her
out or make some other commitment so that she could humiliate me or,
in a worst case scenario, get me fired.
http://www.ericberne.com/games/games_pe ... y_rapo.htm
This went on for a couple of weeks and it was quite disturbing, so I
decided to do something about it. I went over to her desk, making
sure that there were lots of people around who could hear me, and
said, "Would you like to go out for lunch one day next week?"
My strategy here was as follows: Since she had been openly and
repeatedly flirting with me, and everyone knew it, asking her out for
lunch was quite appropriate. Furthermore, since I did it in the open,
there was no real opportunity for her to turn this into some scene
involving humiliation or harassment, which she would have been able to
do if I had tried to ask her out in secret, which I assumed is what
she really wanted. Finally, if she did agree to go out with me, I
would be able to ask her to tell me what the hell was going on. I
still considered it a possibility, though very unlikely, that she had
some non-malevolent purpose in mind, such as asking advice about her
father or something.
Well, her face turned red and she freaked. She sputtered something
about never going out to lunch, and she didn't suggest any
alternative. That's all I needed to hear. I smiled and said "OK" and
walked away. After that, we exchanged an occasional pleasantry, but
the game of Rapo was over, much to my relief. I was pleased that I'd
been able to get through this situation without getting myself in
trouble, and without pissing her off so much that she would have to
take revenge.
Basically, this girl treated me as a buffoon because I was a Boomer.
I recognized it because I've seen it happen to other people, and it's
happened to me online in other ways, as I've described earlier in this
thread. She was not a Gen-Xer, but she shared the Gen-X cultural
philosophy that all Boomers are clowns and idiots that can be
manipulated and humiliated for fun.
One reason that Boomers get into trouble these days is because they're
basically trusting people. They may be arrogant and narcissistic, but
generally they don't try to screw other people just for fun. Thus,
they're basically completely caught by surprise and baffled by
the Gen-X culture, where screwing other people is considered
fun. (See, for example, the Breitling commercial.)
For many Boomers, the first time they ran into this was in their
marriages, where the women adopted the feminist philosophy of using
children as bloody battering rams against their husbands in a divorce
situation. This is exactly the strategy that caused the children to
hate their parents, and by extension all Boomers, so that now in the
2000s they treat all male Boomers as piñatas.
If you're a Boomer male who is getting involved with Gen-X female, you
should generally not believe a word she says, unless your age is
pretty close to hers. If she's more than 10-15 years younger than
you, she might stay with you if you have lots of money, or if she has
no other place to go, but she will never love you. When the time
comes, she'll use false allegations of abuse to get as much money as
she can from you, and to humiliate you as much as possible.
If you're a Boomer, you have very few options if you want to survive
in the Gen-X culture. Boomers value expertise and hard work, but
incredibly this counts against you with Gen-Xers. I first noticed
this in the 1990s. Since I've always worked 50-60 hours per week, I
started getting angry remarks from Gen-Xers who said I shouldn't work
so much. One feminist, complaining that women get paid less than men,
said that you can't work more than 40 hours a week because you never
get anything done after 40 hours, something that's totally absurd.
But your biggest problem is if you're an expert on something,
particularly when you're dealing with Gen-Xers who are truly morons.
If they're in positions of power in a job situation, they'll screw you
and try to get you fired. This is particularly true if they're doing
something illegal, or if they're just incompetent. So if you show
your expertise, you'll be screwed. Being an expert on something isn't
of value to Gen-Xers who wish to glorify their own incompetence.
Boomers have to realize how much things have changed since the 80s and
90s. If you want to survive, you have to understand this change, and
try to do as much as you can to protect yourself from it. You may
have been valued as a human being in the 80s and 90s, but today you're
nothing but today you're a worthless bozo to be manipulated, screwed
with, and taken advantage of -- by people who actually get
satisfaction out of screwing people.