Reply #65: No shit, I once worked with a guy, a computer engineer, and he brought in his...

[Poll_Blind]

...new baby. Still in the carrier, so like 2-3 months at the most. Beautiful little egg-headed kid like his dad. His wife had brought the child into his office and when I walked by, they invited me in to show him off. I said it was a cute baby and they were like "Oh isn't he though! Thank you!"

And then they both got quiet and more than a little grim and the dad said "Yeah, but we're going to take him in for his ears. See how his ears are like that? He kind of looks like Dopey from the seven dwarves."

So right about then I remember my mind desperately calling out, inwardly, asking exactly what expression I was supposed to wear and for Christ's sake what I was supposed to say, if anything. I'm sure the best, neutral, thing I probably said was "Uhhhh..."

And then the wife says "Yep, we're going to take him into the doctor and have his ears fixed up next week."

And the husband says some bullshit about it being a simple procedure and how they cut the cartilage here and there and then pull it together or whatthefuck, but I wasn't listening.

And then here is where I made a big mistake. Both of them had college degrees and both of them were snooty and both of them were Jewish. I know this because they seemed to regularly slip the college and the Jewish into conversations, usually to explain away some snooty point or other.

And while having college degrees or being Jewish really didn't have anything to do with anything, every once in a while the husband would explain something and then he'd tack on "It's a Jewish thing." And my part was to nod sagely for a million different extremely wise reasons and let the conversation continue. The particular company I was at was really small and so we'd go out to dinner with each other (as a company) quite a bit. And so there, during those dinners every once in a while you'd get the "Jewish thing" from the wife. But I always felt (and my knowledge of Judaism has grown to support this much more over the years) that it didn't have to do with them being Jewish. Or college graduates. It had to do with them being generally know-it-all shits who, if they could, would use the fact that they were both college graduates, and Jewish...as sort of a punctuation to preemptively shut down discussion of the merits of this-or-that statement that they'd made.

And so, I promised to recount to you my big mistake. Here it is. Because I'm generally an up-beat person (and certainly at work), somehow I felt it would be the best thing to just say what I felt.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with his ears. He's a baby. Why would you do that to a baby?" I just blurted it out like an idiot.

And I even said it in an upbeat tone, in a non-specific, hopefully non-threatening way. Like I wasn't talking about their baby but, ya know, babies in general.

Well that went over like a dozen shit-filled birthday cakes.

The husband, my co-worker, starts shaking his head in little short shakes. It was his way of reminding us all that we didn't have a Master's degree in whatever it was he took. Little "No" metronome.

"No. No. No. No. No...this is a thing that runs in the family. I had to have my ears done when I was a baby." he said, if you can imagine him saying it scoldingly. And I'm just getting a whiff off bullshit off this because I'm thinking that that would mean he would have had cosmetic surgery, as a baby, in like the 1950's when the wife could nolonger apparently contain her rage.

And then, because they were fucking apparently bukkake-drenched in shame about the fact that their kid had mildly-floppy ears, and that her husband's seed wasn't quite right or something, and I'd metaphorically pulled down his pants in front of his wife to reveal his inadequate tweeter...the wife says...

"It's a Jewish thing. You would never understand."

I had just walked into the office because they asked me to come in to take a look at their effin BABY.

I said all you can say, which I don't really remember exactly how I got out of there but I'm sure it was something like "Oh, sorry."

I was dying to say "No, it's not a Jewish thing. Or a college thing. It's a your-both-cocksuckers thing, and there's nothing wrong with your baby." But "Oh, sorry." was the quickest way out and it's not like it wouldn't have changed any minds.

I had almost entirely forgotten about this incident until I read this story. I hope the kid I saw as a baby is happy (this was about 10-12 years ago), but I have a feeling the more important question is whether his parents are.

PB