Given the various anxiety triggers I have lived with all my life, which have lent themselves to countless incidents of disruptive, uncalled-for, rude, scary and generally reprehensible behavior on my part, and cost me more things, situations, opportunities and people than I care to go into just now, I'll at least summarize my approach to the kind of encounter you're talking about here by saying that I have, step by tedious step over a great many years, managed to dial in a way of life where the things that cause me to be easily mistaken for just an incurably bad person are things I manage to avoid by the most circuitous and ridiculous requirements for myself you could even imagine.
For that matter, you probably can't.
And meanwhile, yes, I have worked very hard on simply improving my behavior in such situations when I have no way out of them.
But the downside of this is that, God help me, I come from the twentieth century. The earliest models I was shown for exemplary or even routinely acceptable behavior probably originated in sixties television, where even moderately-educated people of modest means were seen in both dramatic and real-life situations taking a certain pride in speaking plainly, explicitly, accurately, and using well-chosen vocabulary and well-organized grammar to make themselves as clear as possible to an interlocutor.
And nowadays, in the Century of Stupid where vague and oblique sarcasm loaded with cliquish esoteric social-media-trained cues to mark one's unspoken allegiances is what is taken as the least threatening manner of speaking, and one must never, ever, ever put others in the position of having to endure one speaking of things in their most direct and literal contexts, ever... the entire contents of the previous paragraph now lend themselves to my being taken as some kind of threat more than ever.
And being treated as a threat is the one thing, in the first place, that had always made me act like a dangerous asshole when I felt cornered.
So to the question of have I ever, etc.... yes. This in its way is quite a bit of the story of my life. Automated menus and the like ain't the half of it.
Given the various anxiety triggers I have lived with all my life, which have lent themselves to countless incidents of disruptive, uncalled-for, rude, scary and generally reprehensible behavior on my part, and cost me more things, situations, opportunities and people than I care to go into just now, I'll at least summarize my approach to the kind of encounter you're talking about here by saying that I have, step by tedious step over a great many years, managed to dial in a way of life where the things that cause me to be easily mistaken for just an incurably bad person are things I manage to avoid by the most circuitous and ridiculous requirements for myself you could even imagine.
For that matter, you probably can't.
And meanwhile, yes, I have worked very hard on simply improving my behavior in such situations when I have no way out of them.
But the downside of this is that, God help me, I come from the twentieth century. The earliest models I was shown for exemplary or even routinely acceptable behavior probably originated in sixties television, where even moderately-educated people of modest means were seen in both dramatic and real-life situations taking a certain pride in speaking plainly, explicitly, accurately, and using well-chosen vocabulary and well-organized grammar to make themselves as clear as possible to an interlocutor.
And nowadays, in the Century of Stupid where vague and oblique sarcasm loaded with cliquish esoteric social-media-trained cues to mark one's unspoken allegiances is what is taken as the least threatening manner of speaking, and one must never, ever, ever put others in the position of having to endure one speaking of things in their most direct and literal contexts, ever... the entire contents of the previous paragraph now lend themselves to my being taken as some kind of threat more than ever.
And being treated as a threat is the one thing, in the first place, that had always made me act like a dangerous asshole when I felt cornered.
So to the question of have I ever, etc.... yes. This in its way is quite a bit of the story of my life. Automated menus and the like ain't the half of it.