Douchebag Intrusion

One of the wonderful things about the holidays is meeting friends of friends of friends at holiday parties.

Unfortunately, the transitive property does not apply, so the people two layers of friends removed... might assume they are automatically your friends, too.

I seem to keep running into these business/salesguy types who, for whatever reason, are

a) surprised to meet a girl PhD scientist
b) hitting on me (despite the presence of Mr.PhD)
c) not remotely attractive or charming
d) trying to tell me that I need to "figure out what I want to be when I grow up"
e) think they're much older than me, when in fact they are not
f) might even go so far as to tell Mr.PhD how lucky he is

Part (d) by far annoys me most. I think it's mostly because I look young, and because of that, most normal people don't understand that 5 years PhD + 8 years postdoc = I'm already pretty much all "grown up".

And when they ask me about my career, I say well you know I had pretty much figured out what I wanted to do, and that hasn't necessarily changed. And I try to hint that it's a much longer conversation than I want to have at a party. And I attempt to change the subject and/or go talk to someone else ASAP.

I'm not sure how they think they're helping me by giving me these lectures, or why on earth they think I would be completely honest about something deeply personal with a perfectly drunk perfect stranger. Or if this is just an extended part of (b).

And here I'm trying to be polite because, you know, friends of friends or whatever. Otherwise I would just tell them to fuck off.

Mostly I try to laugh and shake it off, because it's happened to me enough times now that I'm familiar with the type who does this, and I don't take it personally because I'm pretty sure they do it to everyone, all the time.

Also, when we walk away and Mr.PhD simply says, "I hate that guy! He's the textbook definition of a douchebag!"

That always makes me laugh.