Ways middle aged men have told us off this week

[Siblingsadness]

I've got 2 today and it's not even midday yet
I swim every day at 6am . There's normally about 6 of us, today I had the pool all to myself. I swam in one of the lanes as i am working on staying straight during certain strokes. After about 20 minutes a man got in the pool. I've seen him before, he always goes in the unlaned bit and does physio walking up and down.
Today he came over to the lane and said I shouldn't be in there as its the fast lane and I wasn't fast. I thought he was joking so I laughed. He then said he wasn't joking and I needed to move. Of course I told him not to be ridiculous, no one else was in here and if someone fast wanted it, I'd move. He called me a silly batch.
Then just now in tescos, I was in the pasta aisle and a man picked up a jar of pasta sauce and said "is this any good" I said I wasn't sure sorry, I normally just get the passata and put onion and garlic in it. He sort of mocked me and said "ooh good cook are you" I said yes, I'm OK and I enjoy it too. He then said "well at least I can parallel park you silly cow"
Now I know I just encountered 2 nutters (maybe a third is on the way) but I'm a bit cheeky and a cow before lunch today despite just going for a swim and buying cheaper pasta ingredients. 🤣🤣

I have a good one. Tried to park in the last remaining space in a small car park. Tiny angry man swearing and shouting at me for some reason. I gave up in the end and let him have the space. Which he couldn’t park in either ! He drove off a testerical huff complete with revving. Absolutely hilarious! Utter twat.

Couple of weeks ago in the heatwave I was returning to my car in the station car park. 50 yards away from it I hit the unlock button and held it down to open all the windows/sunroof to let the heat out.

As I’m putting my laptop in the boot a suited middle aged male shouts from two cars over “did you know you left your windows open on your car all day?”

me: oh thanks by I opened them as I approached the car to let the heat out

man: (rolls eyes and laughs) no, you don’t understand, you left your car windows open all day

i really wanted to reply by saying 1) my car auto locks and closes everything if I walk out of range
2) your brand new Audi would do the same too sunshine but I can’t be arsed to explain it to you.

i then smiled, said thanks and left.

I went to a spa hotel on my birthday once with my mum. There were 2 swimming lanes and one person in each. I started swimming and the man using it refused to swim at one side so that we could pass each other going up and down- he said he was the only person who could use the lane, bad luck, he was there first. the other lane had a very slow swimmer in it and I swim quite fast (as fast as this man was swimming) so didn’t want to intimidate the other swimmer. The non-lane bit had people just chilling out.

No lifeguard to speak to as it was a private pool but he really spoiled the moment for me. Git.

Honestly, the only suitable reply to these kind of idiots is ‘fuck off’.

I lived in Glasgow for nearly 40 years having moved up there from England.
I was always in awe of the women in Glasgow because of their ability to make themselves heard and stand up for themselves.

I was on my road bike with a friend the other day. We rode through the road that goes straight through the golf course.
we were talking about something and pedalling fairly slowly. A man shouts at us and tells us to be quiet near the golf course. I laughed at him.
he told me he wasn’t joking. I just carried on laughing and told him to get over himself.
the sense of entitlement that he could control
noise in an outside area.
I guarantee he wouldn’t have said a word if we had been male. And I guarantee he didn’t go over to the football pitches that were backing on the golf course where there must have been 300 men playing a tournament.
i wanted to turn round and tell him what I thought but friend wouldn’t let me.

What does that involve - just your fingers going up and down your thigh? I can't quite imagine it, but it does sound useful. I once decided that I would not shove over when some man sat next to me on a bus with his thigh touching mine. I did that kid thing you do in a car: in my mind's eye, I drew a line down the centre of the bus seat and knew I was fairly and squarely on my bit: he was encroaching on my half.

However, he seemed to take my refusal to shift over to the window to allow him more space as some kind of interest in him and he started looking at me and leering. Yuck.

A homeless man asked me for money while I was walking down the busy street with my young son, I just ignored him (have had abuse from beggars in the past when I’ve responded). He then started to shout after me ‘smile love, cheer up’ etc etc - I turned round and said ‘excuse me? Don’t tell me to smile, you dont know me’. He then shouted back ‘yea you don’t know me either!’ - and I pointed out that that’s exactly why I hadn’t spoken to him in the first place! He then called me a ‘snobby cunt’. Absolutely outrageous that a man should a) ask money off a lone woman in the street, ignoring all the men around, and b) hurl misogynistic abuse when she doesn’t smile and hand over her cash!

Mine are always around my dogs. Tossers, who like to shout at women but wouldn't say Jack to a bloke. Then you get the wankers, in cars, trying to bully women drivers. Bless them and their small dick syndrome.

When stuff like this happens to me I generally think they’re probably going to give themselves a stroke or something, going round being so irritable and unpleasant all the time. Not that I’d wish that on anyone but it can’t be very healthy.

Not at my local pool. The slow, medium and fast lane markers clearly say how fast you are expected to swim in each lane.

Oh I had similar at the gym recently - I was doing lat pulls when a random guy came over and interrupted me mid-way through, tapped me on the back and told me ‘I wasn’t doing it right’ and proceeded to try and ‘show me the right way’ by taking the hand grip from me and repositioning my arms.
I was doing it just fine exactly the way I had been shown by the staff in my gym induction many months ago and I really didn’t require the uninvited mansplaining. I think it was just an excuse for him to interfere with my workout and to command some attention.
It creeps me out to think that I was being watched like that, just going about my business to be honest.

I remember once parking in a supermarket, quite close to the line on one side, but still in the bay. The car park was almost empty. I came out to find someone had parked right next to me, making it so I would have struggled to open the drivers side door. The bloke, I'd guess in his 60's, had parked and was waiting for me to return. He started to tell me off about my poor parking, so I climbed in my passenger side, over into my seat and just reversed out while he was still shouting at me.

I still can't imagine what possessed him to do that.

We have a neighbour in his 60's who's garden backs on to ours who loves to make snide comments and digs at me.

My favourite was when he told me I had to cut back a tree that edges on to his garden because it was attracting wasps and it never did that before I moved in.

I told him for a start it's not even my tree it's overgrown from his next door neighbour and encroaches into my garden as well as his, but also I'm not the fucking wasp whisperer so it's probably just a coincidence that there were more that year.

He also accused me of trying to poison him with asbestos when we had our garage re-roofed, I assured him it had been professionally checked and removed safely and was told he knows for a fact that every garage in our area has asbestos and I don't have a clue.

He has never, in 12 years we've lived here, had a word to say when my husband is home. Always just me alone or with the kids, it's not coincidence.

Good grief! What an absolute numpty. Good for you for carrying on with the whistling.

Ideally you would spin round and punch him in the face and then say oops sorry I'm a bit jumpy if someone taps me on the back.
As to Mr pool walker, ideally respond something like- that's rich coming from you you can't even swim🤣 and then swim off very fast😶
Probably best to mumble something unintelligible then walk off, and avoid them thereafter. Or wear headphones and act like you didn't hear them.
Yesterday in the gym I accidentally dropped something on my foot, a really nice lad came over to see if I was alright, I was very touched😇
I live in the gym and I've had a lifetime of men glaring at me and trying to intimidate me, not wanting me on their territory, but there are lots who are also nice and friendly.

I could not agree more with this post. A lot of people seem to have zero imagination or empathy for anything beyond their own experience. A couple of topics on MN where this always arises are public transport and delivery takeaways.

• I'm in a remote hotel miles from anywhere and the hotel say they aren't doing food this evening
• My car is off the road and I need it to drive to my job six villages away

invariably provoke fifty responses of "order a Deliveroo" or " just catch the bus like everyone else".

Absolutely no idea how other people in their own country live.

As someone else pointed out, fast/slow lanes are relative. If there is only one person swimming in a lane, they are just lanes.

She cant know whether she will be swimming slower or faster than any other person who might or might not turn up at an unspecified future point

I think the sort of person who would give any consideration to whether they were swimming faster or slower than someone who wasn't there before choosing a lane is probably also the sort of person who wouldn't sit in a public picnic bench because a stranger had put a reserved sign on them all.

As does asking them if they were born a c*#t or was it an acquired skill?

One of the reasons that I have front and rear dashcams!

If someone has told me off for whistling and then recited a poem to me I would have immediately recited various limericks memorized as a child 🤣
The ostrich is a silly bird with scarcely any mind
He often runs so very fast he leaves himself behind
And when he gets there has to stand
And wait about till night
Without a blessed thing to do until he gets in sight

I was out shopping by myself and stopped at a busy cafe for lunch. Collected my meal and saw there were 4 seats on the same side of a communal table. Seat 1 was next to the wall. Middle-aged angry man was sitting in seat 3 while holding onto seat 4, and had his back to seats 1 and 2, so I passed him and sat in seat 1 to leave an empty seat between us. Unpacked my lunch and started to eat when he said “that seat’s reserved”. I looked around and calmly said I can’t see any reserved signs. Explosive reaction from angry man which culminated in him getting right in my face and yelling ‘f*ck off’ before storming out followed by 2 adult kids who had been elsewhere in the cafe. There had been 4 empty seats, there were 3 of them and 1 of me but maths didn’t seem to be his specialist subject.

A lovely couple opposite were outraged by the angry man’s behaviour, particularly the guy who informed the cafe manager about what had happened and hung around after finishing his meal in case the angry man came back, as he’d been so aggressive and I’m not the type to be aggressive back. Gave me hope that as the angry men are dying out the next generation can be kinder and more intelligent!

People are mad and it is totally unacceptable. I have posted on here previously about how people think it is acceptable to shout, be rude and generally try and ruin your day by being vile and been trolled for it and told it is my fault (which just reinforces my point).
Sorry you have experienced this OP. The next time it happens to me I am just going to say don't be so ridiculous, you are talking nonsense and ignore.
I am fed up with ignorant, horrible people trying to spoil my day.

Where in my post did i write anything that made me appear anything other than calm 😂

Once a man stopped and asked for directions, to orient myself I said the area he wanted was north of the city and he was heading south. He swore at me, said I knew nothing and drove off at speed, in the wrong direction.

Sorry about your shitty interactions op. Sometimes women just existing is too much for some men.