What is the most pretentious thing you've seen someone do?

[kinzarose]

Inspired by another thread. When I was at university there was an older lady who thought she was vair posh, was very keen to have her designer labels on display and loved name dropping brands into conversation. We had a group tutorial over lunch once, so we all ate together. This woman took a two foot (yes, literally) wooden salt and pepper mill out of her bag, stood up and started grinding pepper onto the shop bought sandwich she had with her. It was just the most pretentious thing ever, she was a "food snob" apparently 🤣

@longwayoff

LivingDead, in 1986 or so, visiting US singers asked my workplace to provide them with 30 new white bath towels and, oh bugger, sushi for 15 people. Sushi? Had to comb London for it. Think we found some at a West End hotel eventually.

Aaah the 80's, where prawn cocktail was the height of sophistication and 'curry' had raisins in it! This was in 2010!

Apparently the first prepackaged sandwich wasn't produced until 1980! We've come a long way...

@spiderlight loved your Archie(Versace) story so much that when I bought 2 Guinea Pigs today, I named one girl Archie

Cake forks eh? Some years ago I startled MN by repeating a message I took for a manager at work "please inform Ms X that her order for grape scissors is now available for collection from Aspreys" No, I've never seen any, cant describe them and dont know how you use them. But I've entertained myself over the years imagining what you might do with them. Sometimes involving grapes.

@longwayoff

Cake forks eh? Some years ago I startled MN by repeating a message I took for a manager at work "please inform Ms X that her order for grape scissors is now available for collection from Aspreys" No, I've never seen any, cant describe them and dont know how you use them. But I've entertained myself over the years imagining what you might do with them. Sometimes involving grapes.

I have to hold my hand up and admit I own grape scissors. They were passed down, so not bought by me or for me. Mine are long, like hairdressing scissors almost, but with fancy handles. If I can dig them out I will upload a pic. I can remember my Mother having them out at her cheese and wine parties in the late 70s/early 80s. The guests snip off a small bunch instead of pulling the grapes off the stem. Must admit it made the bunch look tidier as it slowly diminished throughout the night.

O thank you myface, I'd be glad to see them.

@2catsandhappy - that's made my day!! I hope you and your Archie are very happy together!

@Yourstupidityexhaustsme my mum has decanted cheaper gin into a nicer bottle before! In her defence we've got a judgy neighbour who pops round so I think it's to not give her any ammunition... and possibly satisfaction at knowing what neighbour is really drinking!

I was out for dinner in a relatively nice restaurant with a group of girls and one of them ordered the steak but requested it to be spatchcocked.....the bemused waiter spoke to the chef who said that's usually only done with poultry but he can cut it in half for you if you like 🤣🤣

So she basically asked for her steak to be sliced into 2 slimmer rounds. Not sure if she was trying to be pretentious or just got mixed up from something she'd had before.

I work for the NHS and work in an affluent area in SW England. Some of the things I’ve seen and heard make me laugh out loud!! Most memorable was when I asked a patient who was transferred to my department after lunch if they wanted a sandwich. They graciously accepted, so I asked if there were things they liked or didn’t like as we had a selection to choose from. They politely told me that they liked prawns but only ate Honduran ones. I apologised, explaining we didn’t have prawns of any description and was thinking along the lines of ham, cheese and egg.

@MedusasBadHairDay I can totally imagine people in my Berkshire village saying the same about Slough.

My dad is a physicist

retired physics teacher

Butterflied steak, I guess, sliced through the middle. Could have been worse, how does spatchcocked butterfly appeal?

@rainbowmash

"Try using an ASDA bag in Waitrose. When I did, the checkout lady pulled a face like I'd spat on the conveyor belt."

In This Thread: a bunch of fabricated anecdotes copied and pasted from the infamous Overheard In Waitrose facebook shitpost page...

I guarantee this never happened. I often end up in the Waitrose branch of a very-ok part of London, (and I worked at checkouts for years), and I guarantee that staff aren't interested in either your bags or their brand identity.

In fact, the more I see this exact story being rehashed here, the more it starts to look like snobbery on the poster's part (unfairly caricaturing shop staff while clearly not understanding the nature of service-based jobs at all).

Some of these posts are genuinely funny and surprising. Some are just blatant signalling!!!

Guarantee what you like. You're wrong.

Hint: I was there.

What is this nonsense about shopping bags?
I shop in all the supermarkets and have bags from all of them, I very much doubt anyone even noticed, let alone pass judgment, on the carrier bags you use.

Android's Rules of Life #94: Never believe what someone who wasn't involved tells you would have happened, rather than what you know happened.

A couple we know are always doing absurd things to flex (took their daughter out of nursery one day a week to afford a membership to a fancy health club, bought a second hand Range Rover when neither of them can drive etc).

Anyway, funniest and most absurd thing was the mother flexing about buying her daughter a steiff bear every year for Christmas and birthday (and fancy wine but that’s another story), and would do so every year until she was 18. I asked her what an 18 year old was going to do with 36 bears and she didn’t really know what to say.

Some of the comments on this thread don’t really understand what pretension is. If you have a shitload of money and you are just spending what’s normal for you (expensive wine, waiter at a beach picnic etc), it’s not pretentious. It’s pretentious if you don’t actually have the means to do that, or if you pretend to do it.

Insane amount of stealth boasts on here too; but all in all what a fantastic thread 😆

Flex?

@DifficultPifcultLemonDifficult

I was in a waiting room once with my dd, she was there with her Peppa Pig shoes on playing with the toys.

Another mum came in with her child, he was about 3 or 4, and he went off to play with my dd.

The mum then said "Oh, peppa pig shoes, does your dd like peppa pig" I replied that she loved it. She then said "Oh how did you manage to get her to like that, my ds simply refuses to watch anything except David Attenborough documentaries, I wish he would dumb down and watch cartoons sometimes". It was so pretentious it was funny 😂😂

I've had a very similar conversation with a local mum to me. I wonder if it's the same woman. She's awful

@longwayoff

Yes, flex is used as slang now to mean flaunting. I like it as a word as I think it’s very visual in that it’s the materialistic equivalent of flexing muscles.

Ah youthspeak. Thank you. Handy to know.

Me: How did your gig go?

Daughter's boyfriend: Don't wanna flex, but it was calm.

My daughter is going out with a lovely bloke, but he's a drummer.

Where did we go wrong? Should I have been checking her phone?

@SpindleWhirl

The man who forgot how to speak English having spent the summer in France. He couldn't actually speak French though, so communicated to us in mangled franglais.

God that was funny.

I wonder if we know the same person?!

A friend of my partner's has this cringey habit of saying names of cities in the local language. He'll say he went to Napoli or Lisboa rather than saying Naples or Lisbon like a normal person. He goes on and on about Italian food and how he bought a really expensive pizza oven to make pizzas just like in Napoli and how he wants to buy a house in Puglia and goes on and on about where that is. He explains in great detail how to make pasta dishes and authentic pizza. He talks about his holidays in Lake Garda and how beautiful the region is. Every Italian word he pronounces is in a really exaggerated fake Italian accent.

What's really cringe is that I'm half Italian and he doesn't know, because he's never thought to ask. I grew up eating all these foods he talks about and visiting Lake Garda almost every summer. I'm not totally fluent in Italian but I can speak it. He obviously just thinks I'm some uncultured Brit who's never been anywhere and likes to talk at me and show off. I just nod and smile.

@CecilieRose Why don't you reply to him in Italian and watch his face?

[quote sueelleker]@CecilieRose Why don't you reply to him in Italian and watch his face?[/quote]
I sometimes fantasise about doing it when he's talking at me. I'm sure one day soon I'll do the great reveal :p

But you know the problem with people like this? I don't think they ever really have the self awareness to understand why their behaviour was so embarrassing. I think he'd either just brush it under the carpet and pretend he hadn't spent months mansplaining my own culture to me or get annoyed with me for not telling him, as if it's my fault he made such an assumption. I suspect it won't be the 'gotcha' moment I'd like it to be, lol.