Are people really being mean to me? Or is this just in my head?
March 16, 2016 6:50 AM   Subscribe

Lately I've not been wanting to deal with humans due to experiencing one too many situations lately where strangers I've had to deal with—in most cases cashiers—have talked to me like I'm some kind of laughing stock schmuck. I often tell myself that I don't care what people think of me, but when a string of people have seemingly mocked me in a very short amount of time, it really can do much to make me start thinking that, hey, maybe I am a shmuck after all. And the main reason it bothers me is because, well, I wouldn't mind making friends. And I worry that with so many people thinking I suck that this will prove to be difficult.

Two recent examples (I'd list more but I'm tired as hell):

Yesterday I went to a liquor store to buy beer and when paying for my beer the cashier there asked me if I'd rather keep the receipt or instead have her 'file it' for me, something which I've never had a cashier ask me (which, apparently, is slang for throwing it into the garbage. I guess you're not really bound to hear this ever when you tend to always use self checkout and buy things off the internet). I replied with 'oh, you can just put it in there, thanks' (meaning the bag containing my alcohol, which I was pointing at while saying that) and she looked at me all awkwardly then burst out laughing in what to me seemed like a very mockingly way and then asked me 'umm you mean, umm, your bag that has the beer in it? Or . . .' The whole thing pissed me off and left a bad taste in my mouth . . . but, I suppose, there is that off chance maybe I'm just overthinking all this.

Another example: the other day I went to a corner store to buy pop for my niece's birthday and when ready to pay asked if one of the pop flavours I chose counted towards the '2 for $4' sale. She replied with 'yes' and I said 'ah, good'. She then burst out laughing and then said 'but there are taxes too', making it seem almost as though she thought I was too dumb to realize this. And her laugher did not stop which made me feel very awkward. Again, there's that off chance I'm overthinking this and that she wasn't really mocking me, but I really don't know.

Now I should add that both of the aforementioned women gave me a happy-sounding 'hello!' prior to tallying up the total worth of my items (but, then again, they're pretty much paid to do this) and I also want to say I have an autism spectrum disorder and that one or both of these things maybe, just maybe, are making me often misinterpret what people are trying to convey when they laugh around me when in public. I dunno . . .

Anyway, apologies for this quite lame post. I'm just really down in the dumps here and would like to know whether you folks think maybe I'm just overthinking all this or that these people are really laughing at me. If the former, what makes you believe so? If the latter, what makes you believe so? And, also: what can I do to stop people from messing with me?
posted by anonymous to Society & Culture (27 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Dude, no one is being mean to you. These are folks who are trying to connect, they don't think you're stupid. They're trying to get you to laugh with them.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 6:52 AM on March 16, 2016 [60 favorites]


Not having been there we can't say for sure but I find it REALLY hard to believe either of these people were mocking you.

The "burst our laughing" seems weird but I'm more inclined to believe that you are reading a nervous/polite laughter as mocking than that two separate cashiers cared enough either way to burst out in mocking laughter. Especially since the things you did/asked weren't anywhere near the realm of mock worthy.
posted by magnetsphere at 6:58 AM on March 16, 2016 [15 favorites]


For the next week or so try to keep track of all the interactions you have with people that don't turn out like this. I'm sure you'll find they greatly outnumber the times when it does happen. You just notice the negative ones more.
posted by bondcliff at 6:59 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


FWIW I'm not on the spectrum (AFAIK) but I do, from time to time, misread these sorts of social cues, and I've realized that the thing that triggers their additional laughing after the cue (similarly, I think, to what you've described) is often my unconscious and vaguely puzzled facial reaction. They aren't being mean; they think I'm being ironic or sarcastic. In these cases, when I'm aware of what has just happened, I'll sometimes play along and invent a thing to be fake-confused by, or just say something like "I haven't had much sleep" or whatever.

There have been cases where I wondered if I was being mocked, but they didn't involve low-level service industry personnel. In general, their job security is not improved by derision aimed at customers. Having been in that sort of mind-numbing customer-service position myself, I'd wager they're instead so acclimated to fast-paced and wacky social interaction that they seek to foster it (because it's not boring) and don't realize how it can be misread.

The good news is that clerks who do this apparently aren't taking one look at you/me and surmising "Uh oh, better not try to connect with THIS customer," as I know I did in many instances (and as some such clerks have done to me, visibly--which I'm usually juuuust fine with).
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 7:11 AM on March 16, 2016 [19 favorites]


These don't seem like mocking to me. They seem like people who are trying to be funny and failing. I would be confused by these interactions as well.

I work in a position that requires me to make small talk with people more often than I'd like, and I try to make little jokes because I find it pretty silly. I know for a fact that many of my jokes were not understood by my interlocutors, and I'm pretty sure a couple were taken as insulting even though I didn't mean them that way. Pretty sure that's what happened to you. Doesn't seem to me like you did anything wrong.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:12 AM on March 16, 2016 [32 favorites]


There is a tiny chance these people are mocking you, in which case most people would judge them for being weirdly mean and not you.

To be realistic, however, it is far more likely they were just trying to connect with you. I am awkward and on top of everything I have a very weird accent (think Fez from that 70's show). People tend to laugh when they interact with me, but I am pretty sure it's because they find my awkwardness endearing and well...funny. I usually join them when they laugh because I know I am awkward and I think it's funny as well. Like, the thing with the bag would totally happen to me, but I would have probably laughed with them. So there is a chance you are naturally likeable, endearingly clueless (like me), or simply very approachable.

And there is also a chance they weren't really even thinking about you? Like maybe their mind was somewhere else, they were bored, whatever.

What I am trying to say is that it is ultimately your choice to go through life choosing to interpret things in the least favorable way or to make the choice to give people the benefit of the doubt. You can choose to see people as being nice unless proven otherwise, and even if they go all the way and prove they are mean, you can see it as their own battle to fight and not take it personally. It's not only more beneficial for you, but also more realistic since it's unlikely random people would be mean to you for no reason.
posted by Tarumba at 7:14 AM on March 16, 2016 [9 favorites]


If they were really bursting out laughing (and not just polite laughing as some people do in interactions), it sounds like you reminded them of something funny that happened earlier that day with a different customer, and they laughed. (Like, maybe in the 2 for $4 girl had a customer who had a giant fit that morning over the taxes and made long-winded and increasingly insane arguments and the way she and her coworkers dealt with the stress was by laughing about it after, and when she said "but there's taxes!" it reminded her of the laughing from the morning.) (The liquor girl, it sounds like maybe from her visual perspective she thought you were gesturing at something behind your bag (wall o' bachelorette party toys?) and laughed at herself as she realized her very funny mistake but it was inappropriate to share with a customer.)

Neither of their sets of words sounds particularly meanly directed at you.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:15 AM on March 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


Although I am not on the autism spectrum, I also suffer from weird interactions with check out people. :) So it is not just you! I constant misread their jokes and end up with some sort of awkward interaction. Based on your description of these events, my best guess is that both of these people were trying to joke around with you in a light-hearted/positive way, and then when you didn't respond to that, they laughed a little nervously and/or to try and get you to laugh along. Neither of the examples sounds like mocking. If this does happen again, I would try laughing along and/or saying something like "Sorry, I'm so bad at picking up on jokes!"
posted by rainbowbrite at 7:16 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


I think you are misinterpreting what the laughter means. The vast majority of the time, when people laugh, it's not because something is actually funny -- it's usually a way of expressing friendliness, or showing vulnerability, or making a connection with the other person.

Women often laugh when they speak to show they're being playful or not totally serious. Or, it could be that you seem nervous and they're trying to set you at your ease and make you feel more comfortable through their laughter.

I actually think that laughing in someone's face as a way of mocking them is extremely, extremely rare. So if you have trouble reading social cues, you should assume that someone laughing during an interaction is trying to be friendly.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 7:16 AM on March 16, 2016 [47 favorites]


Sometimes I feel like this! I first noticed it when I moved across the country and was feeling particularly lonely and vulnerable. I remember walking down the street one day and someone gave me a look and I thought "Oh my god, I must look so stupid, that guy just looked at me and KNEW what a loser I am".

And then I realized how lonely I'd been feeling and how much negative thinking I'd been doing. And it took a while to crawl out of the dumps (self care, therapy, meditation etc). And now I consider those kinds of observations (eg. that person is making fun of me, that person hates me) as my own personal warning system that I need to take a little time to take care of myself.

YMMV of course!
posted by stray at 7:18 AM on March 16, 2016 [7 favorites]


Cashiers are too bored and busy to take a personal interest in you one way or the other (unless you're being actively annoying or are so hot they're distracted by your total hotness). Honestly, if cashiers are laughing, it's most likely at some strange voice in their head they use to amuse themselves with every customer.
posted by xingcat at 7:31 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


Sounds to me like the cashiers were stoned. If they weren't stoned it sounds like there was no malicious intent, but if there was, it is their problem, not yours. You did not do anything wrong or impolite. Are you sure it was laughter and not just a friendly smile trying to overcome what may have been an awkward moment for both of you?
posted by AugustWest at 7:52 AM on March 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


Because of my experience working in various positions as a cashier, I'd be inclined to interpret this:

She then burst out laughing and then said 'but there are taxes too', making it seem almost as though she thought I was too dumb to realize this

...as coming from someone who'd once had a jerk of a customer get irrationally angry at her because taxes were also included and she didn't explicitly say that. The laughter, in that case, would be an attempt to play it off as a joke so that you wouldn't think she was assuming you didn't realize about taxes.

People get irrationally angry at cashiers all the time for things that are beyond their control. Given my experiences of people taking their frustrations out on me over dumb stuff that I had absolutely no control over--one example being multiple restaurant patrons over the course of six months literally screaming "FALSE ADVERTISING!" at me because their root beer mugs weren't frosty during peak times, because there wasn't time for the mugs to sit in the freezer and get frosty--I tend to err on the side of assuming retail workers are reacting in ways designed to head that sort of response off.
posted by telophase at 8:06 AM on March 16, 2016 [33 favorites]


Regularly overthinking these types of interactions and being convinced that people are laughing at you maliciously is like the one-two punch of textbook social anxiety. If you have access to mental health folks you should definitely bring this up with them. There are tons of ways to mitigate social anxiety from workbooks to talk therapy to medication to structured groups and more. Also, autism and social anxiety often show up together just by virtue of people on the spectrum unfortunately having to deal with a bunch of added difficulty in life because neurotypical people can't think outside the freakin' box. So there are specific resources out there for autistic people who are struggling with social anxiety, too.

Anyway in the particular cases you describe, I think the cashiers were either awkwardly trying to get you to laugh with them and you missed a joke or something, or they were laughing at their own private inside jokes. Cashiers are not paid enough to muster the energy to be mean to random customers. And if they have been trained to greet customers with a chirpy "hello!" that points to a little bit of sales training so they have likely been told repeatedly that you never ever make a customer feel bad. I know from experience. All signs point to you perhaps appearing a bit glum and their laughter being an attempt to elicit a smile.

If you are getting stuck on thoughts about how you would like to make friends but these people aren't seeming friendly, reframe it a little. A cashier is almost never going to actually befriend a customer unless you become a regular and hang out there all the time (don't hang out at liquor stores and corner shops). They aren't in the category of friend-able. So what they think of you is completely irrelevant to your friend making concerns. The people who you would be best spending your energy on getting to know and befriending are folks who like the same activities as you, are in groups that you would like to join, or are already in the places you like to go to, like your favorite park or game store or library or bar. Cashiers do stuff and go places too, but when they do they are no longer cashiers. When they are on the job then they have to be kind of different people, people who are unavailable for friendship.
posted by Mizu at 8:08 AM on March 16, 2016 [8 favorites]


On the second example: there are people who either don't realize there are taxes, or realize it but decide to make a fuss about it anyway, and these (tiny minority) of people are the sort who are likely to raise a big fuss when their "2 for $4" items actually turn out to cost $4.14, or whatever. So the "but there are taxes too" serves as an attempt to head off those people before they get going.

But the vast majority of people don't need to be told that, and I think the laughter is more to express "I know it's silly that I'm explaining this to you, as you almost certainly already know that." In other words, it's the opposite of laughing at you because she thinks you don't know about sales tax; she's laughing at the absurdity that you do (almost certainly, from her perspective) know about sales tax, but she still needs to mention it for the very small fraction of people who don't.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:11 AM on March 16, 2016 [19 favorites]


I replied with 'oh, you can just put it in there, thanks' (meaning the bag containing my alcohol, which I was pointing at while saying that) and she looked at me all awkwardly then burst out laughing

Accidental sex joke.
Now thinking about dicks.
Thinking about dicks at work.
Oh god this guy knows I'm thinking about dicks.
I'm just trying to do my job.
Oh god, this is awkward.
But also funny because dicks.
posted by phunniemee at 8:21 AM on March 16, 2016 [21 favorites]


Cashiers do and say the same series of things repetitively all day, every day, and they end up with scripts they follow without thinking. I think in the first instance, your response forced her to go off-script and she was genuinely confused as to what you wanted.

"asked me if I'd rather keep the receipt or instead have her 'file it' for me,"

You didn't reply using her script: "I'll keep it" or "go ahead and file it." Using different terms to reply knocked her out of autopilot and her laughing was that kind of nervous laughter people get when they're confused.

I've had similar things happen when I bring reusable bags to the grocery store. There's one store in town where they really just don't know what to do when people bring in their own bags. They regularly pull the plastic bag open and when I say "that's ok I have my own bag" they will stand there confused for a second and then *throw the plastic bag away.*


You didn't do anything wrong and she wasn't laughing at you.

In the second example, I think as others have said, she was just connecting with you - maybe she thought you were price-conscious/frugal because of your question. Maybe she wanted to be sure you knew the full price so she wouldn't have to call her manager to cancel a sale, maybe she was commiserating over high taxes, who knows.

I understand that you are sensitive to these things, but at least in these cases I think it's a matter of you anticipating/looking for a negative response rather than there actually being one.
posted by headnsouth at 9:02 AM on March 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


Nthing everyone who thinks these were just weird interactions and nothing aimed at you or caused by you. As an awkward person myself, it always helps me to remember that most other people also feel awkward a lot of the time! Phunnimee's interpretation of the first instance sounds spot on to me - and again, that wasn't your fault or directed at you (I experienced something similar once when I unthinkingly remarked on the 'huge package' one of our mailroom guys was carrying around ... Oh god it still burns)

When reminding myself that life is often just awkward and embarrassing for us all, one other thing that helps me is to think of the following line from Desiderata:

You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

I bet even trees and stars feel awkward sometimes :)
posted by DingoMutt at 9:03 AM on March 16, 2016 [3 favorites]


This does sound like a confusing set of coincidences, I can understand why you would be taken aback!

Laughter can often be (I would go so far as to say it USUALLY is) a reaction that expresses surprise or amusement, rather than mockery/derision. I don't say this to make you feel self-conscious, but the fact that both of these incidents took place in roughly the same context (toward the end of a transaction with a cashier) makes me wonder if perhaps you were making some kind of facial expression (or gesture, or conversational pause, or something like that) that is different from what the cashiers would expect in the usual social script for that kind of interaction, and their laughter is a reaction to that. They may have thought you were intentionally trying to make a joke, or just been taken by surprise.

If that IS the case, I don't think there's any need to scrutinize or change your behavior at all. Just be aware that you may be doing something in these specific situations that reads as "funny" to the cashier, and expect them to react accordingly. If it is not the case, I can't see anything in the situation as you describe it that warrants mockery/derision, and what I would do in a situation like that is assume that the person was having a bad day, or something like that, and not take it personally. There are lots of grumpy cashiers out there who can be rude, and there's no reason to think that something that happens in a split-second impersonal interaction like this would be predictive of your success in forming friendships (which usually come out of totally different kinds of interactions).
posted by Owl of Athena at 9:04 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've been a cashier too. In scenario 1, I'm assuming you just seemed a little out of it so she giggled as a way of reaching out/connecting. In scenario 2, I would guess she was trying to say "don't forget tax" while laughing about the fact that, you know, it's just a couple cents tax, because customer service is a constant battle of telling people stuff without offending them.
posted by stoneandstar at 9:30 AM on March 16, 2016 [6 favorites]


Women often laugh when they speak to show they're being playful or not totally serious.

This in such a big way. It's often totally unconscious but I notice myself doing this constantly when talking to strangers or engaging in any kind of service interaction. It's also not necessarily about being playful or unserious but also about showing that you're non-threatening/non-confrontational, friendly, submissive, etc. I don't think you did anything wrong at all but if you did say something that confused these women or threw them off their game a little, subconscious laughing in response is absolutely something that a lot of women are socialized to do. It means "I'm not sure what you're talking about, which makes me a little nervous, so I'm going to laugh to show you that I'm on your side and we can continue this polite interaction."
posted by telegraph at 10:00 AM on March 16, 2016 [12 favorites]


You should read this thread, which is chock-full of these kinds of awkward misunderstandings, from both sides of the sales counter, and just in general interactions.

Everybody does this, all the time. Most of the time when people laugh in public around a stranger, it's out of nervousness or an instinctive response. It's really nothing to do with you. If you're not sure what a laugh is about, smile, say thank you and withdraw. 99% of the time it's an attempt to cover confusion or to indicate someone isn't being completely serious, not people laughing at you.

I was an awkward kid and have become a semi-outgoing adult. Really, most of that change was learning not to dwell on interactions, as I slowly realised that most of the time, most people forget about you the moment you exit their eyeline. Until you know someone really quite well, you will have misunderstandings and a lot of the suck can be removed by identifying and pointing out when something has been misunderstood, or just smoothly glossing over it and carrying on like nothing happened.
posted by Happy Dave at 10:03 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


apologies if I am just repeating anything upthread; too much up there to read it all. So I'm Nthing whatever it is I'm repeating... :-)

I sometimes think that I'm just a teeny-weeny bit of an Asberger's case; I've sometimes failed to catch social cues and said a lot of awkward things. So of course I wound up having to work in sales in my earlier life, and now manage people, which forces me to learn a lot of compensating strategies, for better or worse (sometimes involving smiling and laughing while I am standing there not understanding WTF someone is going on about, sometimes involving lessons I've finally learned maybe 20 years later than others...). I have a son who is maybe a bit more like this than I ever was, but mostly reminds me of myself at that age. So I think I feel at least some of your pain here, and here goes my take on these kind of situations:

-- don't forget that in any given situation, it may not be you who's awkward, it may be them. "Sidestep weird/misunderstandable game/set of instructions someone in public wants to play/tell you to do and just ask them to do what you want already" is a TOTALLY legit strategy, and why on earth would your request to put the receipt in the bag be construed as odd? That's one of the 2 standard ways of dealing with a receipt, at least in the good old days before "email it/text it/use the app/whatever" entered the picture. So that cashier was just misfiring badly; the episode with the pop sounded more like an attempt to be funny, as others have said, but was very awkward, and I can see why you felt that way.

-- one thing in particular you mentioned, and I mention it because it's bothered me more as I've gotten older - people just laugh nervously all the time. Sometime when you're in public just watch people interacting with others - talking with their friends, the cashier ringing up others, etc. Some people just laugh like some kind of tic. I used to have a friend who was an attorney, very professional and successful, very good with people generally, but literally never said a word without ending the phrase with laughter. One of those things that, once you notice, you can't un-notice, but if you are a person who's self-conscious and has been laughed AT as a child (like I was), it's good if you can realize that most of the time it's just this weird thing that people do (and you shouldn't try to change - see last point)

FWIW, there is at least one anthropological theory of laughter that our primitive ancestors used it as a signal that things were okay. Say you're in the woods and the wooly mammoth runs across your path - you laugh because the thing just startled you but didn't see you. So it's easy to see the connection between laughter and nervousness/awkwardness. I'm pretty sure this was Steve Martin's entire career as a comedian in a nutshell.

-- finally, some people are just assholes, and that's not worth trying to figure out either. I was waiting on a customer once and the customer's 16 year old son starts doing something weird with his feet. I just stopped and looked at him in legitimate confusion - not offended at this point, just confused and concerned. And then he says something like "who walks like that?" and starts doing the monkey motions again more deliberatly. I finally work out that he's mocking the way I walk.

Now, no one has mocked the way I walk, besides this twerp, in my entire adult life. Objectively, therefore, there was something going on in his mind that was not about me. But that didn't stop me from wondering for quite a while what it was I did, how I was placing my feet, that made him think it was funny. Life is too short to worry about stuff like that. People have all kinds of physical differences and speech pattern differences and dialects and what-have-you, and it's on the jerks who make fun of it (and sometimes imagine things that aren't there), not those with those differences. Took me a long time to even begin to learn that.
posted by randomkeystrike at 10:59 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Just putting this out there: It almost sounds as if they were trying to flirt with you. Might that be the case?
posted by Vaike at 12:40 PM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


Former retail worker here. I agree with other commenters about corner shop cashier #2: there is a 99% percent chance that during the course of this "2 for $4" sale, the cashier has suffered a steady trickle of penny-pinching Rules Lawyer customers complaining that "You never said there would be tax! I'm not going to pay tax! I live in a tax-free county, I shouldn't have to pay tax! Tax is not on the sign! The sign says 2 for $4! That's false advertising! I should get all of my drinks for free in compensation‼"
posted by nicebookrack at 1:02 PM on March 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


Yeah, I say don't sweat it, anonymous. People who work behind a register have to deal with hundreds of individuals a day. If they're laughing when they serve you, it's probably more likely their way of trying to make their way through the day and lighten things up for the both of you. Don't take it personally.
posted by Diag at 9:38 PM on March 17, 2016


We're never going to really know. So life is more fun (and successful) if we pretend the cruel things people say to us are jokes. The really awesome thing - if they're trying to crush, we just took the wind out of their sails by seeing it as a friendly joke. The other really awesome thing. If it was a friendly joke, we gave them the connection they were aimimg for.

I'm on the spectrum, i fuck up ALL the time. Good people give me a pass because I'm never malicious. I give good people a pass for the same reason, and the bad people, Meh.

I spent this evening looking for support for high functioning aspies in my area, because I'm drowning. But you made me grateful, it's at least one of the areas I'm not drowning in anymore (after years and years of painful self-reflection post every day action. Assume people mean to be nice. If that wasn't their intention, your reaction should piss them off. I was probably told thus as a youngster, when nasty kids weren't subtle, and i couldn't carry it off because - durr-stupid, but yeah, nice. Assume everyone is nice because the nice people deserve it and the arseholes hate it).
posted by b33j at 4:33 AM on June 6, 2016


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