Ticking people off

I don’t know what I said or did to provoke this response.

My old blogging buddy Greg – he’s not that old, actually, but is one of the first bloggers I actually followed – wrote on his Facebook page a while back: “Have you ever ticked someone off, and you know you ticked them off, but you’re not sure how? If you’re not really good friends with them, you can’t really ask them, and they don’t say what happened, and it’s weirdly frustrating. Recently, it’s happened twice to me … It doesn’t really affect my life too much, but it’s just annoying because I do try to not tick people off. Has this ever happened to you?”

OK, he didn’t actually write “tick” but close enough. And yes, one DOES want to be self-aware.

Yeah, it’s happened at least a few times. Once was when I was playing intermural volleyball at the Y in the early 1990s, and this particular woman, who previously had been reasonably pleasant to me, suddenly became really hostile to me, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what I said or did to provoke this response. Other people, both male and female, seemed to still like me. And since she never actually SAID anything to which I could address, it just went on for a few months, then the session was over, and that was that.

There was this young woman in the 1975 production of Godspell who became really nasty to me. At least, in this case, I THINK it was because she didn’t think I was very good. And on my solo, she may have been right. For some obscure reason, the director switched my piece from “We Beseech Thee” to “All Good Gifts”, from something in my vocal range to something that stretched it greatly. I do recall a rehearsal for a group song “You Are The Light of the World,” for which she had the second verse lead. The entrance is earlier than the first verse, and she was late on it. Though it was not my job to do so, I said to her, “You were late.” She sneered, “No, I’m not,” but the director noted that in fact, she WAS NOT on time. I never would have taken it upon myself to correct her if she hadn’t already been hostile to me.

I used to be SO good at passive-aggressive…

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