Why do people find simple questions offensive?
To add to jessamyn’s list: asking another adult what their “parents do for a living” is a great way to make people you’ve just met uncomfortable. Someone I’d been introduced to asked me that once, within the first few minutes of a conversation. This question is guaranteed to kill 90% of conversations.
I once knew a guy like this. He thought he was superior to everyone else because he didn’t care about other people’s feelings. He’d ask the most intrusive questions and get angry and defensive when someone wouldn’t answer. He was never promoted, he was left out of social activities, and women tended to leave him after a few dates. Because of this, he thought he was being picked on by jealous, insecure whiners who couldn’t handle the truth. In reality people thought he was a not-very-bright Grade A asshole and jerk and didn’t want to spend time around him, and his employer didn’t quite trust him and his social awkwardness enough to promote him into a position where he’d be managing other persons. He also liked to, as he called it, subtly insult people in ways they ‘were too dumb to catch’. He never once caught on that everyone noticed the insults but didn’t call him on them because they assumed he had stupidly put his foot in his mouth again.
I’m not ashamed… the reason I don’t like personal questions is because too many people judge you by that information, and they might spread it to others who will also judge. It’s extremely unfair to judge someone you don’t know. My sister is an evil bitch, and we recently got some new neighbors who know her. They have already told our other neighbors that they hate us, based on my sister’s behavior, but they haven’t even met us! I don’t so much consider it rude, but I hate when people’s first question for me is what do I do (where do I work). I think people place too much weight on what your job is. (And no, it’s not because I have a crappy job.) When I was in nursing school, my mom would introduce me, “This is my future nurse.” When I changed to computers, it was “this is my computer tech.” No, I’m your DAUGHTER… those are just jobs. A job does not define who you are.
There are some great answers here, especially qwip’s. A minor quibble. Answers to these questions do give useful information to the asker. Claiming they don’t (None of your business!) is just a rhetorical ploy to avoid admitting that the person doesn’t want to be judged on those grounds. It’s perfectly legitimate to control how much we disclose of ourselves. Let’s also be honest here though. We assess everyone constantly on whatever limited information we can pick up. How much money a person makes, how much sex they have, how much they weigh, etc., gives us more data and allows us to fine tune our assessment of both that person and of the broader categories, e.g. people who make more than x. No one likes to be labeled or judged on what they see as partial information, e.g. job, ethnicity, school, etc. Everyone wants to be understood on the basis of the ‘real’ them. Well, there is no true complete knowing, just a conglomeration of someone else’s choice of labels.
