I find it hard to insult people. No matter how offhand or unhelpful or condes-cending someone is to me, I have trouble answering them in kind or showering them with abuse.It goes against the grain to call someone fucking stupid or a mindless arsehole. Or even a useless prat. It always seems to me that upping the ante like that will be counter-productive. They'll get ruder, I'll get angrier, and nothing positive will come of it.
I tend to shrug off a disappointing response and either continue to be polite and reasonable or walk away from it. I also assume there's probably a good reason for their rudeness - they hate their work or they've got a blinding headache or they've had one too many awkward sods to deal with. Or all three. So I'm reluctant to pile on the aggravation.
Perhaps I'm too charitable by half, too sensitive to other people's feelings and too inhibited about expressing my own. On the other hand, perhaps those who're always ready to answer truculence with more of the same are too impulsive.
But people who blow their top easily soon get a reputation for being difficult to handle and best avoided wherever possible. They may get what they want in the short term, but in the long term their fiery reputation does them no good.
People who have violent spats in public just strike me as embarrassing and childish rather than assertive. "Act your age" seems more fitting than "Good for you." Of course we all secretly enjoy the spectacle of a no-holds-barred slanging match, as long as it's happening to someone else, but at the end of the day it probably doesn't gain much. In fact it's just fucking stupid.
