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A stranger got randomly pissed at me and I don't know what triggered him

SephiZack

SephiZack

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
692
This morning I was sitting at a cafe in London with my girlfriend. We were minding our own business and talking about our life (friends, work, college). Our conversation was mostly in Mandarin Chinese with some English-borrowed words thrown in there (my Chinese is not that good as I was born in Europe).

Halfway through our conversation, this dude calls me. I turn to him and see that he's visibly pissed.

Our conversation goes like this:

Him:"Do you have something to say to me?"
Confused Me:"Sorry, what do you mean?"
Him:"This is how I do things because it works for me, ok?" while pointing to his (work?) laptop.
Still confused me:"Sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about"
Him:"You should stop judging other people. You guys have a sad life"

My reaction to the whole conversation is just

It's been a few hours and I'm still confused. I didn't even know about his existence before he tapped on my shoulder, I have no idea why he thought we were talking about him.

I assume he misunderstood some Chinese words?
A black classmate once misunderstood some Taiwanese girl and though they were saying the n-word (they were actually saying 那個, which means "that").

I wonder how common these situations are
 
Merv

Merv

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,780
Insecure people get defensive when people are speaking in another language.

They assume you are talking about them for some reason.

Yerba_Sutra said:
I often hear about folks who assume people around them speaking in a different language are doing so to judge them without getting called out. It's weird. Idk man
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Yeah this.
 
KarmaCow

KarmaCow

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,271
It's the dangerous combination of insecurity and narcissism that leads to someone thinking other people speaking in a different language are talking shit about them.
 
WedgeX

WedgeX

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,338
Some people just assume everything is about them.

I had one dude accuse me of being racist in my college’s library because I asked him if he would watch my backpack. These things just don’t make sense and are all about them.
 
A.G. Cook

A.G. Cook

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,709
sounds like a misunderstanding and you’re putting too much thought into it. Sounds like he thought you were talking shit about him and called you out. I would have done the same thing if I heard someone saying something.

Just let it go.
 
PlanetSmasher

PlanetSmasher

Member
Oct 25, 2017
60,032
This happened to me one time. I was eating dinner with my friends at a restaurant and I made a joke about wanting to move out of America to get away from Trump. Someone about five or six tables away from me apparently decided I was being racist or talking about deporting people and threw a fit. They complained to the restaurant manager, and the manager came over to my table and was all confused. The people at the table directly next to us stood up for me and said that I didn't say anything bad. The manager knows me as I'm a frequent customer, which is why he was even more confused.

Then, 10 minutes later, the angry person came back over to us and, apparently dissatisfied with the amount of work the restaurant manager had done in punishing me for not doing anything, insulted us directly without ever actually bringing up what they were mad about. Then she and her group bitched out the manager to his face in front of everybody and stormed out of the restaurant.

I've never understood why she immediately beelined for the worst-case scenario and then repeatedly escalated the situation instead of trying to calm things down. She was determined to start a fight.
 
Aestivalis

Aestivalis

Member
Nov 4, 2018
3,636
He must like well done steak with a lot of ketchup

SephiZack said:
A black classmate once misunderstood some Taiwanese girl and though they were saying the n-word (they were actually saying 那個, which means "that").
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But this was what I actually thought three lines into the thread.

In grad school a dude would keep staring at me with a smile to make me uncomfortable whenever I spoke Chinese to others.
 
Dodongo

Dodongo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,844
Sounds like he was just paranoid and thought you were talking about him. Probably some xenophobia at play here
 
thediamondage

thediamondage

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,928
A lot of people think other people talk/think about them, its bizarre in some ways but actually normal from a evolutionary/psychology/etc situation (predator awareness, danger awareness, etc). Its amplified a lot when people can't understand what someone else is saying, with some good old fashioned racism thrown in.

Almost everyone massively overestimates how much people think about other people. If you aren't one of those people who thinks other people are thinking/talking about you, you are probably in the minority which itself is kinda funny since now you have to "force" yourself to think about whether other people are thinking about thinking about other people.
 
JetmanJay

JetmanJay

Member
Nov 1, 2017
2,316
Sounds like he’s just crazy.
Had someone scream at me as I was walking down the street the other day “THE GIRLS! THEYRE GONNA HURT THE GIRLS! DONT YOU CARE??”- I just nodded, kept walking, and tried to keep him in my peripheral a bit to make sure he wouldn’t try stabbing me with a knife or something.
 
Hella

Hella

Member
Oct 27, 2017
21,209
KarmaCow said:
It's the dangerous combination of insecurity and narcissism that leads to someone thinking other people speaking in a different language are talking shit about them.
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This is my read of it, too. Very eloquently put.


I wouldn't let it bother you OP. There's nothing you can do to placate folks like that.
 

capitalCORN

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
10,393
KarmaCow said:
It's the dangerous combination of insecurity and narcissism that leads to someone thinking other people speaking in a different language are talking shit about them.
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Yeah.
kitchenmotors said:
sounds like a misunderstanding and you’re putting too much thought into it. Sounds like he thought you were talking shit about him and called you out. I would have done the same thing if I heard someone saying something.

Just let it go.
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Wat
 
stersauce

stersauce

Avenger
Oct 28, 2017
2,328
san jose, ca
i had two different instances happen to me on friday

some guy bumped me and my friend and told us to apologize and told us that his dad owned the bar.
then some guy tried to fight my coworker because he was talking to his girl at the bar. turns out he didn't even know the girl, but the dude called the cops on the bar for some reason?

he ended up getting arrested instead

people are fucking odd
 
Bitanator

Bitanator

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,437
I got cussed out by an old man inside of In-n-Out burger for wearing a band T-shirt that had fuck on the back of it (I believe it said Total Fucking War).
 
OP
OP
SephiZack

SephiZack

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
692
Overall, I found the situation quite fun/interesting. The only worrying thing was the fact that the dude was twice my size and could easily whoop my ass if things got more intense.
 
OP
OP
SephiZack

SephiZack

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
692
Jesse_and_the_rippers

Jesse_and_the_rippers

Member
Dec 22, 2017
4,761
I posted a thread not to long ago about someone yelling at me for “talking on speaker phone”, when I was actually talking to the person sitting next to me. Literally yelled at me in the middle of public transportation and I was so confused I didn’t even know how to react.

I think some people are unhinged and they are just looking for a reason to start shit with someone. Maybe too much bad news and FB is making people angry, annoyed and frustrated. Or they are just assholes.
 
Mona

Mona

Member
Oct 30, 2017
23,970
did your girlfriend keep accidentally glancing at him over your shoulder?
 
Westbahnhof

Westbahnhof

The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
9,448
Austria
A woman that regularly came by my place of work kept accusing me (and others) of talking about her, mimicking her, stealing her ideas, stuff like that. "Young man. I know you think I'm very stupid, but don't think I don't notice that you and that girl in the shop are sending each other signals behind my back. I'm a person. You can't treat me like this."

Another woman once got super mad when a coworker asked me something she couldn't hear, and accused him of badmouthing her. Then she started rambling about her not being a nazi.

I think that a not insignificant number of people out there is suffering from paranoid delusions.
 
Mr Spasiba

Mr Spasiba

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,759
People are just crazy. My brother was on the subway once and out of nowhere with zero warning a guy started flipping out on him for somehow insulting his family and being racist, but my brother was just standing there looking at his phone prior to that.
 
Dust

Dust

C H A O S
Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,742
Maybe at some point you and your gf laughed and talked in chinese, his paranoid mind took it as you were laughing about him.

Don’t overthink about it.
 
Bengraven

Bengraven

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,853
I was on a field trip in my junior year and we were in line to go on a tour of the stock exchange when a kid I barely talked to, but we seemed cordial, suddenly yells at me, "if you don't keep fucking staring at me, I'll kick the shit out of you, you fucking f****t".

I found out later that apparently everyone thought I was gay, since some bullies started the rumor and because I couldn't get a girlfriend, and this guy was so fucking insecure and homophobic he must have been counting every time my eyes seemed to be looking at him. I was bored as shit, so I would listlessly stare sometimes, not focusing on what my eyes were looking at, so I wonder if a couple of times I was zoning out and he was somewhere near. We were constantly being told "LOOK AT THAT!" so I suppose when my eyes moved to where that person was pointing, they must have crossed him as well and he was more worried about me looking at him in any way than what people were excitedly pointing at.

He later told his little brother, who was also on the trip, that he was going to find a way to get me kicked off the trip. I just avoided him as much as possible after that and it made the trip more miserable to have to purposely look up or down when I was bored as for fears that someone thought I'd rape them in their hotel room the next night.
 
A.G. Cook

A.G. Cook

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,709
Brazil said:
You would've flipped out at random strangers if you "heard someone saying something" unrelated to you? What?
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I’ve heard plenty people talk shit about others in Spanish before, although I’ve never called them out. But if it were directed at me even slightly, yes I would.

Sounds like this dude might have understood their convo somewhat and the OP said himself he doesn’t speak Chinese well, so a misunderstanding is totally possible.
 
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