Raise your hand if you have ever been personalized victimized by the ignorant and presumptuous judgements of other people.
All of you should have your hands raised right now, because every day, someone somewhere is evaluating something about you—whether it being your age, size, appearance, expressions, etc. Unfortunately, being judgemental is an inevitable trait of the human race. Even if it’s a positive perception of another person, believe it or not, it is still a form of judgement.
Lately, my boyfriend and I have had some serious problems with people’s assumptions about us. The first instance is when he took me out for dinner to Michael’s on the Thames. For those of you who don’t know London very well, this is considered to be a high-end and well-respected restaurant. However, the minute we walked through the door, we knew something was off. Firstly, there wasn’t anyone there to greet us when we entered; we probably stood there for about five minutes before we were taken to our seats (keep in mind, this was a Tuesday night, and by no means busy).
We were led to a lovely sunroom overlooking the river, and then took our seats. Immediately, we noticed that we were the youngest people in the restaurant—the sunroom was full of elderly folks. My back was toward the majority of the people, so I didn’t see their judgemental looks, but my boyfriend did. He fidgeted in his seat and constantly flickered his eyes between me and the people behind us. He just couldn’t relax. Then, to make matters worse, our server neglected us completely; we waited probably 45 minutes just to order. When we finally did order, the server was incredibly brisk, and barely blinked at us. We then waited another 45 minutes, only to realize that everyone else around us had already received their meals, even though we were there before them. They even got a complimentary basket of bread!
In the end, my boyfriend became so aggravated, he dropped a ten-dollar-bill on the table, and we left. It was evident that, because we weren’t older, they didn’t think we would spend enough money to be worth their time. The funny thing is, we did have money, and we fully intended to spend a good penny on a delicious meal. But because of their judgement, we took our business elsewhere.
We experienced this kind of treatment again very recently, when my boyfriend was looking into buying his first car. We walked into the Hyundai dealership to test drive a Tucson. My grandparents had recently bought a car from the place, so they referred us to one of the salesmen there, who would give us a good deal. So, when we walked in, we asked if the guy was working—and he wasn’t, which was fine. But for some strange reason, the front desk employee proceeded to call the salesman and ask him to come in to do a test drive with us. We never asked for this; we just thought it wouldn’t hurt to see if he was working. Either way, we planned to test drive the Tucson.
Things just went downhill from there. We were asked to take a seat while they prepped the Tucson, and they took my boyfriend’s license to photocopy, which again, is fine. However, it took them nearly 20 minutes to scan the license, and another 45 minutes to do the prepping. To make things worse, after waiting for over an hour, one of the salesmen—dressed pristine in his freshly pressed suit—comes over to us and tells us that they can’t get the car battery working. He didn’t shake our hands, he didn’t provide us with a business card, and he most certainly did not provide us with great customer service. His smile was apologetic, but his eyes said “Get lost.”
Now, I understand that things can go wrong with cars; however, the thing with the battery sounded like a load of sh*t. If we had been ten years older, we never would have been treated that way. Clearly, they didn’t see us fit for business with them. Unfortunately, because of their arrogance and assumptions, they lost out on at least $10,000. We took our business elsewhere.
It frustrates me that people have so many negative assumptions and evaluations of the younger generation. Just because I’m young, it doesn’t mean I don’t have money, that I’m a delinquent, and that you get to treat me lesser. And even if someone doesn’t have money or isn’t in the most stable of conditions, that doesn’t give anyone an excuse to treat them like they’re unworthy of kindness and respect.
It’s important to acknowledge that our assumptions of other people can get in the way of our successes and achievements. If that server had actually served us, she would have made a decent tip for the night, and if that salesman had respected us, he could have made a killer commission. But they missed out on that because their judgement calls were very, very wrong—which tends to be the case for almost everyone. As they say, you can’t judge a book by its cover, because you may just be missing out on the best story ever written.