The technical problem solver in me suggests you say "Well, you go in front of me in this queue, but only till we get to the check-in desk!"

Or, "I'll go after you."

Or even through the check-in depending on the relative importance of your shoes to your sense of injustice!

The problem with your solution, Norman, is that it only validates the other person's overinflated sense of entitlement. I have a hard time contributing to that. It's bad enough when some schmuck is driving his suitcase into the back of my legs, now I'm going to let him go in front of me? I don't think so. That happened to me at the Chocolate Show a couple of years ago, only it was a guy driving his kid's stroller into my legs. The first time, I turned around and asked him to please give me a little room, and he kind of shrugged at me. The second time, I glared at him and he totally ignored me, and the third time I said, "I'm not moving, asshole, so knock it off or I'm calling security right now." It was a long line, and I wasn't about to give up my space to such a moron, I don't care if he was in a hurry or not. The fourth time he did it, I turned around, put my foot on the stroller and pushed back. He got out of the line.

My kinda girl.

Like you, I speak asshole -- if I must.

I do try to get my way with force of personality from the start.

A girl started blabbing into her cell in the prescription pickup line at Kaiser. I look at her and said, "IN-appropriate!"

She apologized to the person on the other end and got off.

Good word. I've used it since then, and it does have to be spoken in a very Cathy Seipp-ese manner: emphasis on the "IN!" and then almost equal or equal emphasis on "appropriate." It's very forceful!

Greetings:

I would add one one more thing to your apology recipe.

In my Catholic education, I was taught that a good act of contrition, a form of apology, required a "firm purpose of amendment."

I just finished reading a great book called "Mistakes Were Made (but not by me!)' it talks mostly about the kind of cognitive dissonance people experience when they do something wrong, and how they try to resolve that dissonance. It was really interesting, there was a whole chapter on relationships and divorce that I really enjoyed.

This is today's quote on MSN:

"Tolerance is not acceptance, and indifference is not assimilation."

Carey McWilliams

Heh, I like coming to this site because it gives me insight into the "other side". But when I read this I just shook my head.

I like the feminine view point, on issues etc. that are a concern to me. It is cool to see what you and your women readers think, and how you go about thinking it. But.....

Well never mind, I will just end up being yelled at and forced to apologize, so I will just not read posts I know I have no business in clicking on. Some posts are just going to be "chick" posts, and I just need to skip those.

Y'all sure think you're gonna to teach this guy a lesson! But is he going to learn anything useful from it? In a different thread Amy makes a big deal about the right way to get a man to do something. My suggestion gets the immediate problem solved, does not lose your place in the queue, and gives the guy some space to think about what has happened.

In fact, it outmanoeuvres the guy, without resorting to violence or threats. Because it does not leave him furious or beaten down, there is a better chance he will contemplate his behaviour and begin to see it from your point of view.

Saying I have a "feminine point of view" is 1. not true, and 2. one of the more insulting claims you could make. FYI, to name one example, I advised my old boyfriend in New York to use hookers rather than fooling women. My advice is based in science, reason, ethics, that uncommon thing called common sense, and empiricism.

Furthermore, similar stuff to what's above on the sincere apology is in "The One-Minute Apology" (by a person with a penis named Ken Blanchard) which I read in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport bookstore in a few minutes on a previous trip from Paris.

I suspect the actual reason you're not commenting here is that you have nothing to say. My commenters are probably mostly men, or it's a tie, although I never counted. And very likely they will be the ones who cut you up into small pieces and feed you to the pigeons for some inanity you post here.

Again: if you have something to say, post it. Until you post something of value, well, I'll assume you have a no-nothing point of view.

PS I recommended "Mistakes Were Made" (and managed to do it even with these huge hooters I have, imagine that).

Here's the link:

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

Actually, Amy has written plenty of columns in which she has advocated flat-out telling a man what to do, the most recent being the one responding to the woman who was being sexually harassed by her coworker's husband. Amy didn't suggest that she non-threateningly put forth her point of view and wait to see if the guy would come around - she suggested telling the guy, flat out, to stop, and then trying to make sure that he would face consequences if he didn't stop. That's just one of many examples. What Amy has advocated is avoiding telling a man with whom you have or are trying to build an emotionally intimate relationship what to do. BIG difference. You're not trying to build an emotionally intimate relationship with a guy who keeps "accidentally" hitting you with his luggage - you're trying to get him to stop, and you don't care about his emotions as long as he does. In Flynne's case, she told the guy to stop what he was doing and backed up her words with consequences for his actions when he didn't. Again, she didn't care about the guy's emotions - she was trying to get him to stop doing something that was physically unacceptable to her.

My suggestion gets the immediate problem solved, does not lose your place in the queue, and gives the guy some space to think about what has happened.

Norman, in my experience, the guy (or woman) who's going to be willing to think about something that's just happened and analyze the rightness of his (or her) behavior isn't the person who hits you in the legs with heavy luggage FOUR TIMES in a row in a short period of time. Yes, yes, I'm willing to grant that there are exceptions, but someone who's showing *that* level of disregard for his/her fellow human beings and who is refusing to apologize is basically indicating that he/she wants to move faster at any costs. If you let that person go ahead - as I have occasionally done - I'll bet you $10 that he (or she) is going to smile in a smug manner and be convinced that he (or she) was in the right. One reason that (IMHO) the world has been getting ruder on average lately is that there is an increasing number of people who believe that being "polite" entails letting rude people do what they wish - a stance not supported by Miss Manners, I'll point out. Amy's swimming against the tide as well. My style in these situations may be different from hers, but generally I try to over-reward the polite ("Excuse me, my plane is leaving in 25 minutes, is there ANY way I could cut in line?") and avoid rewarding the rude.

Thanks, Marion. If anything, people (my boyfriend and Crid, to name two) worry about how in-your-face I am. Last night, a woman in line in front of me (at the Paris version of Target) who made off with my toothpaste is damn lucky it took the manager so long to get me the right one, because I looked for her on the street so I could take her photo and put it on my blog! J'accuse!

Then there's the assholes who think they can act without regard to how they're treating others as long as they (insincerely) say they're sorry afterwards. You know the ones who keep acting inconsiderately and don't understand what your problem is the 10th time they do a thing because they said they were sorry. These same people will excuse using people because people never stick around in their lives. Gee, I wonder why.

Way to go, Flynne! Exactly the right way to handle it. We have a physically-challenged asshole that zooms around the underground concourse in the Empire State Plaza here in Albany and purposely runs at people with his little electric hooveraround at the fastest it will go to force them to jump out of the way. For sick kicks are something. Of course, everyone is afraid to challenge him but this New York bitch took one look at him as he started to steer towards me (not to mention that while I don't look handicapped I have very bad arthritis in my knees and two different foot problems and jumping out of any asshole's way just ain't happening) and said icily "try it with me and I will press charges and sue". My voice carried. He heard but pretended he didn't and went around me as if he'd been planning to all along and ever after has taken a wide berth around me.

Sometimes there ain't but one way to deal with an asshole. Or to use my favorite Stephen King quote: "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has left her."

Sometimes there ain't but one way to deal with an asshole. Or to use my favorite Stephen King quote: "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has left her."

Damn friggin' straight! I am so sick of all the morons out there who think they're so much better than the next guy and go out of their way to make others' lives miserable, not in any huge way, but in those nasty little inconvenient ways that are just so maddening, smiling all the while because they're just so sure you won't challenge them! Well, not this little black duck! (Thaid with a lithp in the betht Daffy Duck imitation!) Bring it on, thuckerth! o_O

Then there's the assholes who think they can act without regard to how they're treating others as long as they (insincerely) say they're sorry afterwards.

Ah yes, and their cousins in spirit, the ones who do something awful and then say, "But I felt so bad about it!" expecting total absolution. As one of my friends once said: You knew it was wrong because you felt bad about it, you did it anyway, and now you're trying to absolve yourself from blame. No points for you.

If anything, people (my boyfriend and Crid, to name two) worry about how in-your-face I am.

Well, you can add me to the list, because there are some deceptively crazy people out there, and no offense, but you're not exactly The Rock. :) But I've found that a lot of bullies do back down when you stand up to them and fight back. The key is to identify the small number of nutballs who will take that as a signal to stalk you.

Abuse: Yes, abuse victims, at some point, have to stand up for themselves and get away. That having been said, generally the women going to shelters have essentially been operating with an altered mindset for quite a while. Abusers often start not with physical abuse, but with claiming that their partner is doing something wrong that is making them unhappy. To the untrained ear, it can sound an awful lot like the back-and-forth communication that is healthy in a relationship. The isolation of the future abuse target from her or his other friends and loved ones often gets worked into this.

Once the abuser has created a perception that the future abuse target is a screwup that makes the abuser unhappy, and has isolated that target from her or his natural allies, the physical abuse begins. I'd say one reason that women are more likely to be targets of physical domestic violence than men - not the only victims, by far, but the more frequent victims - is that men are less susceptible to the whole "I'm unhappy and it's your fault!" thing once they get past the initial stage of euphoric love/lust. This is a good thing.

There's a societal meme, very common in romance novels and other popular fiction, that the love of a good woman can heal an emotionally damaged man. That doesn't just lead to women choosing brooding poets over well-balanced teachers - it can also lead to women staying in a worsening relationship way past the point of sanity. I've noticed more cases of men feeling that their love can heal a damaged woman. It can't. Being in love with a damaged person who's trying damned hard to fix him or herself is vastly different from trying to fix that person yourself, and, IMHO, you're doing a grave disservice to the damaged people who have been honest with themselves and are going through the painful process of trying to help themselves by conflating them with the ones looking for codependent enablers.

But the best way to end an abusive relationship is to do so in the first stage. A lot of people do. I'm someone who responds to "Well, you MADE me scream at you!" with "Never, ever call me again, mofo; I know who you REALLY are now." The people who don't - the people who buy into their partners' reality-warping of them as the inferior ones, the people who want to fix the damaged souls of their partners - can wake up one day to find themselves isolated and tied by finances and children to a monster.

The hardest part is often convincing them that this is not normal. Imagine trying to convince a human adult that reality as he or she knows it is wrong. It's really, really hard. If you want to try to inoculate kids - your own or someone else's - against abuse, telling them, "Don't let someone hit you" is only the first step. You have to convey to them how to distinguish between normal relationship communication - "When you do X, it makes me unhappy" - and the beginnings of mental abuse. To bring this back to what Amy said, you need to convey to them how not to be a victim...OR, on the flip side, an entitled jerk. That can be done, but it takes more time, energy, and thought than just saying, "Don't let someone hit you. Next question?"

I think y'all will appreciate this situation, and I simply have to share. So, sometimes it bothers some of my co-workers that I don't date much, especially since I have "so much to offer." Anyway, occasionally some of us who work here go out for drinks after work on Fridays, and, occasionally, I will go as well. Well, this past weekend one of my co-workers invited some guy that would be perfect for me, and she was dying for me to meet him. When he got to the Mexican restaurant (and his clothes were fadish and too young for him), he slaps $100 bill on the table for all to see and snaps for the waitress to bring him a drink. Bear in mind, this is a small town. We are at the only Mexican restaurant in a fifty mile radius, and because I speak Spanish, the people who work there know me well. I would actually consider myself closer friends with them than the people I work with. So, my friend Maria brings him a margarita, but, oh no, he needs a shot of Patron, too. So, while he's bitching about the weak margaritas and waiting on his shot to add to the drink, my co-worker informs me this is the dude she wanted me to meet. I guess because he is so fine (and he is on the outside), she assumed he would be irresistable to me. Once I finished my margarita, he says real cool-like pointing at my empty drink, "I got this." Before I can answer, he's snapping again at my friend, Maria, and he whistles. She comes over, and he orders, "One for the lady. Make it right this time." So, I tell Maria (in Spanish) to bring me one of those monster-fish bowl margaritas, which I never order, and she says to me (in Spanish) "what so you can lap it out of the glass like a dog?" We start laughing a little, but as she is getting me the drink, her comment gave me the idea to do just that. As soon as she places the fishbowl margarita in front of me, I immediately start lapping it up like a dog. Everyone is looking at me like I'm crazy, so I play dumb, acting like what's the problem. (Meanwhile, Maria is watching me do this from across the room and she is shaking her head and cracking up). So, finally my co-worker who invited the dude is getting kinda irritated with me and she asks why I am doing that. At that, I look over at the guy and say, "This is the guy you wanted me to meet, right? He seems like he likes women who act like dogs. I'm trying to be attractive for him." The whole while, I have this shit-eating grin on my face. So, everyone laughs (a little) and he plays it off (naw, naw, naw, it's not like that. I was just...blah, blah, blah.) I laugh a little too, but here's the best part. I still kept lapping my margarita up like a dog anyway. After about ten minutes, I got up and left telling him it was LOVEly meeting him. The margarita was still pretty much full. It was a lot of fun and Maria and I laughed our asses off when I came for lunch the next day. She told me he ended up drinking the rest of my margarita. But, I am in the dog house (ha ha) at work. My co-worker is pissed at me and everyone is talking about what a stuck up bitch I am and how I am probably gay anyway. Oh well. This too shall pass. It's not the funniest thing in the world, but I'm telling you, if you had been there.......

This line can be tweaked to suit your personality and the situation but the gist is the same.

"Don't be sorry! Be Careful!

"I'm not asking for sorry, I'll settle for careful."

"Can you be half as sorry and twice as careful?"

etc, etc.

kg, loved that story! Absolutely great. Ugh, I hate the fixer-uppers. If I wanted a man, I'd have one; they ain't that hard to get especially if you're not all that picky. And if I only had a dime for every time someone thought I was gay because I either wasn't thrilled with their magnificent fixup or some guy did because I wasn't charmed by his supposed charms... well, I'd be retired and still living a better lifestyle than I currently enjoy.

This may be slightly off topic, but my experience with apologies is that people spend WAY too much time defending their behavior while they're saying they're sorry. "I'm sorry I did X but here's why I did it." As far as I'm concerned that makes it a pretty worthless apology. You fucked up? Then have the self-knowledge to know that doesn't mean that you're an ass, you just acted like one for a minute. Once you know that, you have no problem saying, "I shouldn't have done X and I'm sorry. It won't happen again." The end, and no excuses. It means a lot more than "I'm sorry I got drunk and made out with your brother. I'd just had a really bad day at work, and my boss yelled at me and I heard some guy call me fat and your brother made me feel really pretty and yada, yada, yada."

Oh, I love the margarita story!

Good point, AJE!

Thanks Donna and AJE...and by the way, I bought my co-worker lunch yesterday. She doesn't hate me anymore. Some people are so simple and simple minded that it scares me. Nine bucks got her yackity yacking on a different subject. Worth every fucking dime. Having my name come out of her mouth so much almost feels like a prison yard rape.