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!

I saw a post on here from someone saying that they could not contemplate living in a house without a utility room. Now don't get me wrong, I would love a utlity room (which I would no doubt turn into a dumping ground for all things launday related) but given the horrendous housing crisis it does sound a bit tone deaf.

No, the WORST thing you can do is let your children have salami. I was told that I was basically giving my DS cancer because I sometimes put salami in his sandwich!

TBF on that thread didn't op say she had other trips booked but was finding it harder to part with the money just to go and visit her son

Literally!! I was going to post a thread this weekend asking how to make weekends more calm/peaceful when you've got small kids, but I just knew all the comments would be along the lines of "get a cleaner" or "why don't you just hire a gardener" and thought better of it!!

The assumption that everyone lives in a house with a large garden. Some of us live in shock horror flats!

I was going to post this as well!

That's what I mean, they're different. You can have one and not the other. Privilege is a nebulous concept isn't it? To do with whether you personally have certain characteristics that statistically speaking are likely to give you a social advantage. It plays out differently on an individual level and over time. Whether you're rich or not is not nebulous at all - how much money do you have and what is the value of your assets? Add it all up and put it in a tool like this and one can see for oneself

www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc1802/calculator/index.html

But also, don't be vegetarian or indeed ever feed your child a meal without meat because PROTEIN, PROTEIN, PROTEIN.

A remember a thread years ago where a poster described being on the very bones of her arse, and how she would look at the homeware in tesco and could only dream of having such lovely things in her house.

Cue a chorus of, but tesco homeware is dirt cheap, surely you can afford an £8 vase. It's all mass produced crap - shame on you for coveting that, you need higher standards, and if it makes you feel better, just buy it - I'm always popping wee extras in my trolley when I go around the supermarket; probably only adds up to an extra £20 each week.

The lack of understanding was breathtaking.

To be fair on this one, on a thread like this I was on once, someone came on with the tip that she has a handyman who comes the first Wednesay of every month (or whatever) and her and her DH keep a running list of things for him to do that they then email him the week before and he just gets on with it.

And while I still do NOT have the money to do such a thing, this is HIGH on my list of things I will one day have.... when my ship comes in! :) I am still very pleased that the idea is now on my radar!

Jokes aside, I don't mind the cleaner comments as such, but it is mindblowingly annoying when poster has said upfront there's no money for outsourcing so she needs practical, basically free advice. So I do hear you!

Oh, I had a gardener don’t you know. His topiary skills were sublime.

Alas, we had to let him go….

Reality…

He came in twice a year to trim the hedges for 60 quid a pop.

Don’t need him now, we’ve got a fence.

That everyone that works from home should have a home office. That’s today.

😆

As a child of Eastern European immigrants, I have been eating salami (and other pork and sausage products) since I could eat solid food. As have all of my family, friends and most of the population of Eastern, Central and indeed Southern, Europe.

Your son will be fine 😜

💯 this.

There’s some truth to that - a lot of schools offered money off the fees without offering any help with the uniform, travel, other costs. There have always been a few schools that did offer genuine scholarship packages to cover all costs (or advised parents on charities that would also help them), but yes for the most part the poorest children weren’t able to access private schools however bright/talented they were.

It did used to be better than it is now though, we’ve had to stop all scholarships for new pupils as just can’t afford it anymore, so it is the poorer families who have been most affected by the changes.

There was a thread last week about tinned oily fish, where one poster was urging everyone to check out a website where it was £5 - £10 per tin as it was so brilliant. They couldn't appear to get their heads around the idea that others might eat Tesco tinned fish for economy, and then berated people for limiting their tinned fish exposure to sardines and mackerel.

I was a bit nonplussed at one of the responses on the current disappearing husband/barbers thread where the poster stated that she was non-binary and in a 5-way polycule, so going to the barbers took ages because they all had to go in together. I mean, what the actual...?

On threads about adult children I am always surprised by the number of posters who couldn’t possibly imagine ever charging their children keep. No understanding that someone might not be able to afford the expense of keeping another adult.
Even if that adult is earning more than them and doing fuck all around the house.

It’s not unreasonable to hope that once your children are adults you might be a bit better off.

No, it wasn’t. Honestly 😁 You can go back and do an AS.

What was the £5-£10 one? Quite fancy that.

I don't need to, I saw it with my own eyes, it would likely be impossible to search a thread from 6 years ago without the exact wording anyway.

I was told that my receiving UC is an effective (and therefore unreasonable) substitution for a partner’s wage.

I receive £170 UC per month.

We are pretty well off (me and DH) in my view, and still we walk or tube in London. This weekend we came out of a musical, got a tube to XX station which then had a 20 min walk and we werent sure of the direction and it was raining and cold, and we were like "lets get a taxi" and it felt like a real extravagance!!! (£16!!)

It sounds like you know where to draw the line. You don't have to hide what you've got and you can be honest about what you've done, but you're aware that not everybody is the same, so I expect you don't unnecessarily boast. Some people just don't seem to realise that others aren't as privileged.

In fact, there are 2021 posts where they discuss how it was debunked - no one ever said it (re cheese in coffee).