Little Lady: The Gamer Edition – Scenic Cruising , Alaska – [05/10/2018]

Some of you may have been reading these pages long enough to remember my various distasteful encounters with what I lovingly call the ‘Little Lady’ attitude. The idea that ‘you don’t need to trouble your head about that little lady, you wouldn’t possibly understand”. Now ,I am all for men being Gentlemen, and the idea that chivalry is not dead is something that I really hope is true – by all means hold the door for me, but please don’t think that that means I can’t hold it myself.

Or in this case…

Don’t come into my class, see that I’m a little short girl of slight build, who does – on occasion – wear her hair in double pigtails and has a fascination with cartoon characters…and assume that I don’t have the answers to your questions.

This morning, I had my most recent encounter with this …or I guess close to this…attitude. More like general negativity joined with just a slight tinge of condescending…a rather irritating combination in a student. So, a few things I couldn’t say at the time:

Sir, I work for the cruise line, not for the software company, I just teach the software company. Please do not assume that just because I am unable to answer questions that are completely outside of my field of training is worthy of a dismissive eyeroll, you are asking me something that is so far out of my department is the equivalent of asking an engineer a plumbing question. And if you’re already coming in here with the attitude of hating the operating system (when in reality, you bought an off-brand computer that was apparently malfunctioning from the start, and has nothing to do with the operating system) then how on earth am I supposed to teach you anything? And by the way, the shift away from physical media? DVDs and the like disappearing in favour of digital download? That can’t be blamed on any one company, that is a general shift in the market combined with the general public trend to …I don’t know, want to cut back on unnecessary damage to the environment that is caused by overprinting and overpackaging? And also by the way, it’s the internet websites and search engines that generate the adverts online, not your computer system so nope, we’re not to blame for that either. That’d be the equivalent of blaming the movie producers for the trailers that run before the film.

But the kicker really came when he made the mistake of thinking that I wasn’t going to ‘understand the requirements of a gaming machine.

Oh dear, sir, don’t go there…I may not be competitive level, I may not play a lot but the things I do play I play hard. And the game he chose as an example? Just happened to be Amras’ virtual battle game. I played the game myself for only one summer, and I was terrible at it, but as Amras and I try to keep up with each other’s hobbies (the poor boy probably knows more about Titanic than he probably ever wanted to) – I know rather a lot about that game and it’s requirements…therefore the conversation went something like this:

Guest: you probably wouldn’t know this but there a game called…WoT

Me: Aw man that’s a HUGE resource hog! Did you get the new graphics update? There’s no way that you’re going to be able to run that on anything older than a 3 year old CPU, and you’ll need a killer fast graphics card. Otherwise the ping rate is going to absolutely kill you because your chip won’t be able to keep up with the demand. I mean the download *alone* for those new graphics took a whole day!

And he just blinks. It’s only a millisecond, but you can totally see it cross his face “this girl games?”.

I did not tell him of course that my game of choice is Call of Duty, or Civ 6, or Fallout (3 or Vegas, pick your poison)…and that the only reason I knew anything about the game he was talking about was because my fiancé has been playing it for years. He didn’t need to know that particular piece of information

I so should have asked him if he had the new Italian tanks…