warning: serious

I'm calling out Dave Brown. In case he ever googles himself, this might come up, and he can hear what should have been said--save for the fact that when you work for the government in a facility, (as you observe whiners, complainers and dullards who make the work environment an absolute hell, and bitter washed up people who seem desperate to show us all that there is something worse than hell), keeping the peace becomes the priority. Once again pushing Honesty into the back seat.

So David Brown, I hope you read this one day, and take in the loving spirit it was intended.

There we were in the office one morning. Dave Brown comes in and, once the snob coffee is either in the works or in his hand, is ready to start the day, which he spends as one of the county's finer social workers. I mean that. He's good, he cares about the clients. I respect him and usually enjoy his company.
He has spent the last few weeks praising the work ethic and general skills of a certain female co-worker, who just joined the ranks. He had made a point, it seemed, to point out the exceptional performance of this dedicated woman, who was a full time mom until recently when she decided her kids were old enough for her to go to work part time. In fact, everyone on staff has spent the last few weeks doing the same thing. This woman is good and she is in demand. Everyone wants her on their shift.
On this particular morning, however, shift change included something that might have surprised someone new to the field, and had indeed been a new experience for the woman in question. Dave got inexplicably smug.

"Boy, she's getting a real education here, isn't she?" I didn't quite know what he meant, and so I simply smiled. "I mean, her biggest concern before was [here he adopted a mocking falsetto] 'Oh, I burned the muffins!'"

At this point, I had four options:

1) Punch him in the face.

2) Pretend he never said it and fall back on his long history of NOT sticking his foot so far down his throat that everyone in the room gags.

3) Pause, and squint upwards as if contemplating the mountain of condescension from which he was delivering his small minded screed, and then, in a calm deliberate tone, say: I want you to listen close, because I'm only going to say this once. The person of whom you speak has spent the best years of her life dedicated to the world's most important, and most difficult profession. The very reason she is so good at her work here, is because of her dedication to her work as a full time mother. Her job here is NOT an education. It is, by comparison, so inconsequential as to be laughable. Although I can see how you might miss that, since you don't have children. To be sure, this job has some rewarding aspects, but compared to an effective, loving, full time parent, a social worker of any ilk is a pointless, lazy, grumbling, pencil pushing pack mule. So you can take your nose out of the air, and shove your sneering, leftist, childless beuraucrat condescension deep into the orifice from which you seem to think the sun shines. In other words, I love you but SHUT UP.

4) Remain in silence and save the little speech for this most useless of fora.