How to Get Me Riled Up

There are very few things that I won't just let roll off my back. I can deal with pretty much any topic of conversation by simply ignoring it, chalking it up to the ignorance of the speaker, or figuring I should just take a breath and respond to it later.

In the past couple of days, though, I've found two things that have really gotten my goat.

The first happened at work. One of the contractors that works for our company sent a message to me - not really knowing it was to me, more just sending it to the company in general - which was so snarky and disrespectful it just made me seethe. I spent the next 20 minutes writing and rewriting my response until - eventually - it was nice and polite and only readers who know me very well would have realized how pissed I was.

Thinking about it, today, I'm still just massively annoyed by the lack of respect in the message I received. I've been at my company for years - years longer than the contractor - and I probably know her job better than she does. So to be completely dismissed as if I didn't know anything... not cool.

Which, I guess, leads me to the second instance. This one was courtesy of the blessing and curse which is social media. Yes, I know that you never know what people are going to say online, and you never know for sure whether it's being said sarcastically or not. But there are some things that you read and just think "WTF?"

With all of the news about states enacting "religious freedom" laws, lately, that's been showing up online a lot. And usually I ignore the rhetoric, because it's from people whom I may or may not know, and I don't want to get into a shouting match across the Internet - I'd rather have an in-person discussion. But tonight I was basically told that my concern for what is going on in this country - and my praise for companies standing up against it - was misplaced because things just aren't as bad as I'm making them out to be.

Apparently, the fact that in some states I could very soon be denied service pretty much anywhere, including hospitals, hotels, restaurants, emergency rooms, etc. - not to mention that in those same states Christopher and I could be denied access to each other if something happened and one of us went to a hospital where a nurse didn't want to see us together because it was against her religious beliefs - apparently that is just an exaggeration. The statistics about the number of people who are killed or beaten during hate crimes - which often have defense arguments along the lines of "he was flaunting his gayness, it was self-defense" - basically makes it seem in many states that gay men and lesbians are already second-class citizens. How much worse would it be if a policeman, or a judge, decided that there was nothing to do because the victim was gay - and that was against some religious belief, anyway?

So... Yeah... I commented back and made my case for the other side of the argument. I even took my time and made sure that my response was grammatically correct and fairly snark-free.

Twice in two days. I'm on a roll.