What's the most privileged/off the mark post/response you've read?

[waywardways]

I've name changed for this, just in case anyone does an AS and accuses me of getting DM fodder.

Me and the DC had to flee our home several years ago and we were moved into a tiny 2 bed flat temporarily. I made a thread at the time, saying me and 3dc had had a traumatic move and were very overcrowded and asked for advice on how to store our daily stuff in an efficient way.
Several posters replied helpfully, linking shelving units/freestanding storage, but one poster replied along the lines of:

"Your DH must be high up in the army and you have to rough it in officers housing until your 5 bed detached home is ready".

Another poster quoted the above with "This was my immediate thought too! It's so hard OP, but we've all been there".

I found this both amusing and perplexing because a) I would never have assumed the above and b) it was so far off the mark.

There was another thread very recently about food guidelines where the lack of awareness and privilege was quite frightening!

This still baffles me. Did someone ACTUALLY say you should put cheese in your coffee instead of going out to buy milk? I mean, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? How would that even work? I can’t believe someone was thick enough to suggest this. Even during Covid times.

@HereComesAuntySocial thank you for sharing- you have offered some really good examples of tone deafness and lack of empathy, but also of courage to face something really hard. I haven't experienced your struggles myself but I have seen the guts required, and know that, with support, it is possible to get the better of alcohol addiction. Hats off to you for the first 28 days, and stay strong for tomorrow and the next day.

The one where a mother was asking for advice about help at school and education in general for her son, who has special needs. One poster advised her to send him to a private school.

I believe they wrote that they were getting protein or calcium from cheese because milk was hard to source. But then mentioned not liking black tea, and so a legend was born. I do prefer the other version though.

@Ironfloor269 No, they didn’t. They said you could have black tea, and eat cheese as an alternative source of calcium.

@ironfloor269 I did genuinely see posters telling people to put butter in their coffee during covid 🤣🤣

There was a thread where the OP made 100k per annum but said they couldn't afford child care. I pointed out that people earn a lot less and told her I am on minimum wage. I was told that people like me are part of her problem because I am taking out more than I put in. I am not on any benefits, I didn't use childcare as I was a SAHM and my husband supported me, and I also paid for things with savings. So its ridiculous to say I was taking out more than I put in. But it annoyed me and could have really upset me if I'd let it. Also all the other posters seemed to be on her side, agreeing with her that it was almost impossible to afford childcare on £100k.

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This is something called a ‘bullet coffee,’ that some fitness/nutrition ‘experts’ seem to advocate! Nothing to do with Covid.

A number of years ago now a friend of mine was out with her SIL and SIL's very well off friend. My friend was still living at her parents and was saying she was desperate to try and move out. The well off friend looked and her in a really puzzled manner and said "but...but just buy somewhere! Have you not thought about just buying your own place?"

So you are saying that people shouldn't have nice things in case it offends others?

Not cheese, but a friend of a friend couldn't get hold of milk at one stage during the lockdown so started using Bailey's in her morning coffee. Five years later...

Obviously not. Just use some common sense and empathy. Don't make other people feel bad about not being able to have these things. Don't make unthinking and hurtful assumptions about 'everybody' being able to afford this stuff or having grown up with wealth. It's not really hard.

i was watching the news about some really bad flooding once with a friend, and the friend (who grew up more comfortably than I did) said “I just have no sympathy for anyone who doesn’t have insurance.” I remember as a child listening to my (single) mum discussing how home insurance was completely out of reach given she barely made it to the end of the month without having to borrow a fiver from her sister to last the final few days before payday, so paying a significant (to her) sum for the event of something extremely unlikely just wasn’t possible.

A friend of mine (who actually did grow up poor, but then inherited the entirety of her grandparents’ estate, as their only grandchild) told me, when I was in my 20s and in my first ever job, “You could definitely afford a mortgage, I don’t understand why you don’t just buy a house!” Ummm well there’s just this littler thing called a deposit, aka at least £20,000 in savings that I need to find first!

I am so sorry, how truly devastating for you. I too hate those threads and my situation was in no way comparable to yours but like many people lockdown is something that I prefer not to think about these days. I was so lonely and as an NHS worker(Mental Healh) I was seconded onto our Covid Response Team and it was so tough. I woke up every day dreading what lay ahead.

I spent most of my twenties and early thirties living and working in the south east, an area with notoriously high property prices. A colleague of mine, in her mid twenties, was horrified that at the age of thirty I was still renting a flat. "But why? That's such a waste of money" was her comment to me. I replied with well I would argue it's not because it means I have a roof over my head and I'm not homeless. She then responded with "well, owning your own home is much better that's why my parents gave me a house deposit."
I don't begrudge her for having parents who can afford and are willing to do that for her, it is something I would aspire to help my children with with, but hopefully they won't then go about with such a naive, judgemental attitude.

The advice given on some of the educational boards is eye opening. The threads about Math A level being essential when it's pretty well known lots of kids won't get the grades for it. And top tier universities not liking certain subjects when what they actually mean is Cambridge and Oxford don't like those subjects.

On here, I once saw someone say “I just can’t understand why anyone would shop at Shoezone!”
Apparently they didn’t realise that not every parent can afford to drop £100-200 per child every 3-6 months on the 3-4 pairs of shoes all children need (school shoes, trainers, wellies, etc.). Or that perhaps if you’re going to a wedding and need shoes to match your outfit, you might not be able to afford to spend £50+ on shoes you’ll only wear a couple of times a year. Or indeed, that some people can’t even afford to spend that much on their main everyday shoes, and might appreciate a low cost alternative.

Part coming from a place of privilege, part just lazy responding without the ability to think critically, part a superior attitude of “well I wouldn’t tolerate that” (when they’ve never been through it & have no idea how they’d react): All the LTB responses to any mistake made by a male partner - someone posts that their DH of 20 years, who they have 3 kids with has sworn at them during an argument/smacked one of the kids in a moment of poor judgment/shoplifted a pair of shoes and it’s “leave immediately”, “you are being abused”, “if you stay you are guilty of putting your children at risk”. No consideration for the complexities of relationships and double standards (eg. If a woman posts about one incident of smacking her kid & regrets it she’s told, “don’t worry, we all slip up sometimes”)

somebody needs to find the original post to prove this. I've seen it trotted out a million times but never any actual evidence, just people reading other people saying it and then repeating it second third 21st hand. I was on here during covid and yes, some people were absolutely batshit about what counted as "necessary" in all aspects, not just shopping, but the 'cheese' thing was already apocryphal by about May 2020....

I do definitely remember people telling others off for buying easter eggs though because they weren't an essential purchase. Not even going out specifically to get them, but picking them up when they were in the supermarket doing a shop anyway.

I hate the "you should just work hard too" or "just upskill so you can get a better paid job" type comments. Some of the hardest working people I know are earning minimum wage or only slightly above, they are also the kindest and most generous people you could meet. I think people have this idea of a 'career ladder' which is nonsense, it's a career pyramid and there are fewer jobs at each level as your progress so just working harder doesn't guarantee you will move up. I think a lot of privileged people forget how much luck played a role in their success - being in the right place at the right time, being born into a family who could afford to send them to university without taking out a loan, etc.

Who do you think is comparing themselves to you? Weird posts.

I'm so sorry. I have a relative who has PTSD after finding herself in charge of two care homes during lockdown: she was the manager of one and then was told that the manager of the nearby home had quit and that she had to take over the running of that too.

She's since moved to a different job.

i used to get up at 5am as a student to go to my cleaning job everyday for nearly 3 years and saved for driving lessons, where is the privilege in that?