When it comes to arrogant people, it could anyone. Even the people in our daily lives like family, friends, and co-workers. These people share the most pretentious thing they saw someone do. Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
The Nanny Was Making The Big Bucks
“For the last half-decade, my maternal grandmother suffered lots of illnesses, which makes her hard to move around. Having seven children and an able-bodied husband, all her children decided to take turns in taking care of her. My mother lived the second nearest to my grandmother, just a few blocks away. My youngest aunt lived with my grandmother and her two sons after her divorce.
But the funniest thing is, the rest of the siblings always hoped to depend on my mother to help out most of the time, even though my mother was considered the poorest and busiest of all her siblings. While all the others lived in peace with nice cars and being a housewife, having plenty of time to do a facial treatment at a salon; my mother had to be both roles after my father’s death when I was young.
And funny thing is, my youngest aunt who lived at my grandparents’ house, just did the housework during the weekdays. Then she went out for short trips out of the state on the weekends, claiming she was very busy. Previously, my uncle offered to employ my mother as a full-time nanny for my grandmother, with around 1000 Malaysian Ringgit per month (236.27 in United States dollars) . My mother refused not because of the money, but because she felt like she might not have time for her own children, which are my brother and me.
Then after another year, they decided to hire an outsider to become my grandmother’s nanny, as apparently, my youngest aunt was too busy to take care of her own mother, even though she was basically living at her place. Did I mention this new nanny’s monthly salary was around 2000 Malaysian Ringgit? It was even higher than some fresh graduate’s salaries. Not to mention that her job scope didn’t include her bringing my grandmother for a hospital checkup, even though that nanny drove her own car.
But the most pretentious thing was when my young aunt in the family group chat told the others that she decided to give her a bonus in conjunction with the Lunar new year was around the corner and the nanny did a great job.
So sitting in the house, making sure my grandmother ate and didn’t get into any troubles was doing a good job?”
The Manager’s Little Sister
“I was working a summer job in China two years ago. I was on a three-month contract in a very fancy ‘Changlong Ocean World’ type of attraction park in the city of ZhuHai. More specifically, I was a waitress at the hotel buffet restaurant.
One day, I was standing next to the ice cream booth. A girl in her mid-twenties, carrying a cheap-looking Chanel bag (while getting food), was mumbling complaints the whole time she was in the line and tried to cut the line several times. When it got to her, she made an extremely excessive order of ice cream and started sort of flirting but in a very condescending way towards my colleague who was preparing it. After one order of ice cream, she then proceeded to ask for another, and then another. During the making of the third order of ice cream, she started audibly complaining about the fact that the first order was melting.
I tried very hard to not roll my eyes, but obviously not hard enough. She took a glance at me and started a big tirade at the general direction of the counter in Mandarin about rude customer service and about how she deserved better service and more respect.
The ice-cream booth was usually pretty busy, and a line of or more people had accumulated and they didn’t look very happy. At this point, the girl behind the annoying ice cream lady obviously had enough of her rant, cleared her throat, and offered a few words of apology towards me in English. The annoying girl exploded. Her face basically became twisted with fury. I had never seen such an ugly facial expression in my life.
She tilted her head up with an air of extreme arrogance and superiority that you only see in movies and said to the girl: ‘Who the heck do you think you are? Huh?’
The old lady’s face behind them scrunched up, I looked horrified and the chef gave an eye-brow-raising frown. Everyone looked visibly disturbed, except the girl she was trying to intimidate. She just looked very calm with an almost-smirk on her face and pretended to not have heard her. Mind you, this girl was also in her mid-teens. But the annoying girl obviously did something that she shouldn’t have done, because the next minute, the manager of the entire floor came by and took her to the side to talk to her.
She then meekly took the two finished bowls of ice cream and left without a word. The nice, unfazed girl proceeded to politely ask for a simple order of ice cream, and if the chef was okay. They had a laugh before she headed back toward her table. The VIP table. Followed by the most senior manager, holding a tray for her, who shouldn’t even be on shift.
My jaws probably dropped.
The nice girl turned out to be the relative of the governor who was in charge of not only the land this park was built on but also the entire surrounding area. I also found out that the annoying girl turned out to be the younger sister of the manager that took her to the side. She apparently did this arrogant thing a lot but the wait staff was too scared of her because of her brother being a manager. But he soon got fired afterward. “
Her Hollywood Friend
“I live in a country in Asia and this college friend of mine just migrated to the United States with her mom in California. I happened to be going back and forth to the United States as a tourist whenever I have free time to do so. After graduation, she went to California and I went to a famous state in the South. So she invited me to their house if I happened to pass by their state.
So I thought, ‘Sure, why not? It would save me money and I know these people.’
They picked me up at the airport and when we arrived at their home, it was modest and simple. I was surprised because it wasn’t what she was portraying on her social media accounts.
Her dad is a public servant in our country and one time, showed us a photo of her dad’s money bundled up – amounting to 20k because it was election season. I thought it was just a simple ‘showing off a photo’ but then at times, she would tell us, ‘My mom in California asked if I want an iPhone or an iPad. I said I don’t want any of it because I have gadgets already’. She would show photos of her Louis Vuitton bags, Chanel, and Michael Korrs.
When I went there, my perception changed. Her mom married an American citizen who just got divorced so that she could be an American citizen as well, leaving her dad in our country. The now-husband was a slacker and worked odd, part-time jobs. She was too ambitious and wanted to achieve the American dream, wrecking her own family. And that was what her mom used to petition her and her siblings. My friend used to tell us way back in college that her mom worked in ‘Hollywood’ and we were amazed. But much to my dismay, it wasn’t in Hollywood. And they cannot buy a house because it needed a downpayment of 11k. I was confused. Why do they have all these gadgets and bags and cannot pay a downpayment for a house?”
Cheap Tipper
“I was serving this couple at a beachside restaurant. They were in their late 20s. The guy was shirtless and the girl had designer shades and purses at the beach. Anyway, it was Saturday lunch and we were slammed. The man asked for a side of chipotle mayo sauce to go with their popcorn shrimp. It cost 50 cents but I had to ring it in or else I’d get in trouble with the kitchen manager.
I was tending to other tables when the man walked up to me and said, ‘Hey! We’ve been waiting over 10 minutes for that sauce.’
It was five minutes max and I told him it’d be coming out right away but he refused to leave me alone. He followed me around the restaurant and showed me his I.D..
He said, ‘I work for the state bro. You better get me that sauce right now. I’ll give you 50 bucks to go in the kitchen and grab it.’
I told him to keep his money and go back to the table seeing as I’d already rung it in. He continued to linger and hover over me as I was putting in an order on one of the computers. Finally, he turned around and saw the sauce was delivered to his table. His girlfriend motioned him over.
He muttered either ‘Freakinf ridiculous’ under his breath as he walked away. I just kept my cool and didn’t respond. I dropped off their check and was cordial with them afterward. They ended up leaving a dollar tip on a 60 buck bill so in hindsight I wish I’d taken that sucker’s 50 bucks’
That One Co-Worker
“Once in my university days when I lived in Australia, I worked part-time in a nice café. The owner was a really great cook, a lovely person, well-traveled, smart and nice. If only I could say the same about all of the staff. One girl who worked there as well for a time was pretty much a straight-up snob. She even pronounced her own first name in a very specific affected way, to make it sound more cosmopolitan I guess. She also made a big deal about being the best barista at the café because after all, she lived in Milan once (in reality, she was only there a month or so) and since all Italians outside of Italy are all ‘peasants from the south’ (her strongly implied belief, not mine), what would they know about coffee that was better than she what knows?
One day I happened to be on an opening shift with her and another friend, who was also quite an expert on coffee and no stranger to European culture, having been there many times and her father being Greek. The annoying pretentious snob girl, after finishing all the setup, proceeded to make herself an espresso. We both looked on in horror as she filled the rest of her espresso cup with orange juice and mixed it all together before drinking it. I was too shocked to speak, but my friend could not help herself.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked.
The pretentious girl slowly turned around and gave us both a snooty look with a sigh, like she was saying to herself, ugh, these people just don’t know anything.
She then proceeded to say, in her forced pretentious vocal-fry accent, ‘Well, in Milan, this is how everybody takes their morning coffee. Have you ever been there?’
I suddenly realised that this girl’s irritating pretentiousness must be internationally recognizable, and like a penny dropping, I could all of a sudden just see the scene in Milan when she must have learned this fact. Somebody at some point must have been just as annoyed as we were with this irritating person, and decided to mess with her and tell her that mixing orange juice into your espresso was really truly the northern Italian way of having coffee. Kind of like how Australians like to mess with foreigners by saying that Koalas drop out of trees and try to eat your brains.
For a brief moment, I thought about telling her that I didn’t think this was really true. But I already knew that if I even said that, she would just look down her nose at me since I was not from Milan and tell me that I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Can I Get A Light?”
“A group of about 12 guys all in our 20’s went to an upmarket Italian restaurant in Sydney called Mario’s. After an amazing meal, a few of us started smoking. A close friend of ours named Dave who only smoked when he drank, started bumming smokes. So he never had a lighter. After having secured another cig, Dave realized he needed a lighter. So he stuck his hand in the air, looked towards the wait-staff, and clicked his fingers as loud as he could. He did this at least three times as nobody responded. We were all cringing and holding our breath.
Finally, the head waiter, an extremely suave and collected gentleman of Italian heritage came over.
‘What can I do for you?’ he calmly asked.
Dave barely looked at him and said, ‘Can I get a light?’
The head waiter put himself between Dave and the other friend he was talking to until he had his undivided attention.
‘I’ll get you a light,’ he said calmly and paused for effect. ‘But don’t you ever….EVER…click your fingers at anyone in this restaurant ever again.’
The whole table went silent.
‘Do you understand?’ he asked at which Dave apologized and quickly tried to get the attention off him but the waiter made him answer deliberately.
He then calmly walked away and returned with some matches.
Given that Dave was known for these sorts of antics when he was drinking and it was not what our group of friends stood for, we all literally cheered at him being put in his place. It was probably the classiest schoolings to someone being pretentious and rude that I have ever witnessed in person.”
Online Friend
“I planned to take some friends out for Christmas dinner at the Savoy in London. On the first attempt, this one friend, on finding out I had invited another two of my friends, decided she didn’t want to come at the last minute and made it pretty clear she was miffed that I had invited the other two. I was paying for all of them incidentally. So, I said I’d take her out separately for the same dinner at the Savoy in the first week of the New Year, and out we went.
My friend for some reason, had this annoying habit I had only recently started to notice, because we had only relatively recently started to go out as friends, and had been ‘online’ friends for a while before, of talking to waiters like absolute dirt. I mean really treating them like garbage, and for absolutely no reason. Not because the service was bad, or because things were late, she just talked to them all indiscriminately, like they were 51st class citizens. Fortunately, we usually went to concerts and shows and things, so I didn’t really spend much time in restaurants, so I didn’t get to see it that often, but I had really started to notice it, and it was less than inspiring.
So we had our starters and exchanged Christmas presents, and she had written me a Christmas card that said something like ‘This Too Shall Pass’ about some bad time or other I was having when she realized she had left her phone in her bag, which she’d checked into the Cloakroom with her coat. So when this waiter approached, she asked him to go and retrieve her phone from her bag in the cloakroom and gave him her ticket.
Personally, I’d have just got up and walked to the cloakroom myself, but maybe that’s just me. So the waiter returned with her bag, offered it to her to retrieve her phone herself, stood at the table very obviously waiting to take it back to the cloakroom for her, and she immediately went nuts.
‘I said go and get my phone! Not my bag! Why have you brought me my bag?! What didn’t you understand about go and get my phone? Does this look like my phone? Does it?’ She yelled.
This waiter just smiled throughout offering her her bag to retrieve the phone, and she continued when frankly it would have been quicker for her to just reach in and get her phone.
I was honestly expecting at some point for her to use the ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ line. But the whole time, I was thinking it was ‘me’ that was paying for this meal. At which point I just had to say something and interjected.
‘He’s probably not allowed to go into your bag for security reasons. He’s brought you your bag and is clearly going to take it back to the cloakroom for you, so why can’t you just get your OWN phone?’ I said.
Then she gave me this look, which I can’t really explain, but it was kind of like, how ‘dare’ you interrupt me when I’m talking to my staff. She got her phone, settled down, and then she did something even worse, and frankly more pathetic.
We were sitting there, enjoying our meal, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her slowly sliding the Christmas card she had given me earlier, back across the table, towards her, and deposited it back into her own shopping bag. I’m sure she would have slid the gift back in if she could have gotten away with it.
I spent a couple of weeks remarking on how I couldn’t find that card anywhere and how sad I was because it was such a nice card, and how I’d even contacted the Savoy to see if they’d found it, and she never said a word.”
Was He Boyfriend Material?
“I had met and had a couple of dates with a man who worked at the flagship store for Hermès in New York City, on Madison Avenue. He considered himself a social and environmental activist, at least on his off time. His answering machine recording was the music from ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ over which he had recorded in a plummy radio-announcer voice a narration which went, ‘exploitation of the forest; despoiling of natural resources; the extinction of endangered species’ stuff. That wasn’t the most pretentious part.
We were going on a second date, or it may have been our third. We weren’t going to be doing anything special, but I was mildly surprised that he showed up wearing a pair of patched-up jeans. It wasn’t until I got closer that I realized the patches were made of pieces of the Hermès quincentennial Columbus silk scarf. It was the previous year’s style, so Hermès had sold them to staff for a fraction of retail, which was several hundred dollars. You can look them up, the prices for the vintage items have not depreciated.
I was dead broke at the time, tending bar during the day and barely managing. And here was this guy wearing a few hundred dollars worth of scarf that he cut up and used for patches on his 20 buck jeans for the sake of irony.
That was our last date. Tangentially, as we parted, he borrowed a book from me which he swore up and down he would return. He never did, as if I’d needed any more hints.”
Dog Duty
“I was the teenaged babysitter, sitting for a well off but down to earth couple. They were taking the husband’s new client and his wife to dinner. I was asked to watch their four kids. When I arrived, they (with some embarrassment) asked if I would also watch the client’s toy-sized, yippy dog. I could tell they were internally rolling their eyes at the nerve of this couple bringing their dog with them instead of leaving it at home, but felt cornered —hey, it was a wealthy client so what were you gonna do?
But yeah, sure, I didn’t mind. I had a dog at home, and as long as it was well behaved it was no extra work for me really. Until the client’s wife started instructing me on how to take it to the potty. She was a little upset that there were no indoor accommodations for her pooch to poop, obviously believing that roughing it in the yard was below her beloved pet’s dignity. But at least her precious would be clean. She mimed how I should wipe it after peeing and, should it poop, how I should clean its bum. I believe she had instructions, too, on how I should carry it out and back so its paws and fur did not get dirty from being outdoors, but after her first few words my brain went fuzzy from consternation and I don’t recall many later details. Not wanting to embarrass the nice couple who hired me, I just mumbled and nodded in ambiguous acquiescence.
When the dog needed to do its business, I opened the back door and left it in the yard alone for fifteen minutes. Then whistled for it to come back in. No butt wiping occurred. Frankly, I think the dog was relieved.”
Her Wealthy Boyfriend
“I once went on vacation with a friend of mine who just happened to be dating a very wealthy guy. He wanted her to leave town (so he could have a party with a side chick) so the boyfriend paid all the expenses for both of us to fly to Miami. So my friend took advantage of the situation. She ordered room service every morning, booked spa treatments, arranged for a deep-sea fishing charter, bought new clothes, took the plush hotel room robes and slippers, and then decided that she wanted to go to Key West. We rented a car (on his credit card) and drove down to Key West from Miami. It was a beautiful drive.
We checked into another five-star hotel and my friend decided to take a shower. She ran the water in the shower for well over an hour, after which point I knocked on the door to ask if she was ok. She said she was fine, she had not actually gotten in the shower yet but just liked to hear the sound the water makes.
Me: ‘Uh, you do realize we’re on an island and freshwater isn’t a never-ending resource, right?’
She replied that it didn’t matter how much water she wasted because she wasn’t paying for it. Not only that, but when it was time to leave to catch our flight back home from Miami, she decided she didn’t want to drive back. So she ditched the rental car in Key West, booked last-minute plane tickets for us to Miami (again, on her boyfriend’s card) and then complained that the puddle jumper didn’t offer first-class seating.
After that trip, her new nickname was ‘Five Star’ which I still call her to this day.”