In Which I Embrace My Ivy Snobbery
After trying to keep my cool during a back-and-forth with a dense commenter on my most recent CollegeCandy article, I broke a cardinal rule:
Only use the H-bomb as a last line of defense.
I know, I know. It’s so unfair. Once you drop the H-bomb, it’s game over. Because really, who’s going to argue with someone who proved themselves at 18 by landing Harvard admission despite a 9.1% acceptance rate? (And I was an early applicant, too.) It’s entirely unfair to the other party.
Oops. We were arguing about the value of finance jobs. I made fun of them and said the hours were too long for me to date someone in the industry. She got incredibly defensive, derided my job as a freelance writer, and suggested that my education was a waste of money since I should’ve just gone to community college for writing. Being a swine flu victim and all, my patience was tested. Here are the results:
“Judging from your ridiculous assumptions about what Harvard kids are like, I’m almost certain you’re not a Harvard student. However, you’re surprisingly defensive about these coveted cubicle monkeys we call bankers. I can only assume that you’re the neglected girlfriend of some overworked finance guy who you barely see, but idolize from afar. Because he went to some elite school (definitely not Harvard, maybe Penn) and uses words like “problematic”, you believe he’s a genius. Like, a real one. Unfortunately, your relationship is collapsing along with the market, and those lonely evenings are becoming more unbearable and harder to justify. And so, you’re taking this column personally. Not as a banker, but as a girlfriend of a banker. That’s a special brand of pathetic.
I know you’d love an opportunity to point at an example of a disappointment at Harvard since it might make your existence a little less meaningless, but honey, even I WERE a disappointment, I still went to Harvard. The entire point of the school is that you could do absolutely nothing afterward and still be vastly superior to everyone else. See this YouTube clip.
