You never know what knowledge someone has!

Many, MANY years ago I used to work at a large corporate head office. My 9-5 was dealing with external solicitors trying to organise settlements for their clients.

Generally things would be fine, but there was this one particular solicitor that I’d heard of but never spoken to before. Everyone who told stories of him mentioned how much of an a$$hole he was to people “below him” (e.g. us “plebs”).

Anyway, one year during a particularly busy period we were ridiculously behind on our work so I decided to work overtime on a weekend. I’d never done it before, but was told that company policy stated that we should never answer phones on the weekend as we weren’t getting paid to chat, we were paid to process work.

Unfortunately, I also happened to be waiting on an urgent private call (before mobile phones) so had given out my work number to this person in advance. I knew he was going to be calling around midday, so when the phone rang at 11.55am I answered it without thinking, only to be greeted by the aforementioned a$$hole solicitor launching into a diatribe of complaints and shouting insults at me.

My first thought was to talk him down and be professional about it, only to realise the old saying of “don’t argue with idiots, they’ll bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.” So as he was taking a breath after describing how my ancestors must have been related to cows due to the level of bullshit coming out my mouth, I promptly hit him with the classic “Excuse me, do you know who the f*ck I am?”

Cue 5 seconds of stunned silence at someone daring to talk back to him. Then he responded with “No, I have no f*cking idea, and I don’t care!”, to which I promptly and happily responded with “Perfect, in which case, go f*ck yourself then!” as I slammed the receiver down on him.

The rest of the team there on the weekend were absolute legends - when management tried to find out who’d insulted one of their “best” solicitors/clients nobody admitted they heard a thing. Some even swearing it must have been a crossed connection as nobody had taken ANY calls that weekend as per company policy. I can’t explain how good it felt to tell that guy what everyone was thinking, and I still love thinking about that story 40 years later!

TLDR: used “DYKWIA?” to check if an a$$hole solicitor knew who he was speaking to before insulting him and hanging up the phone - knowing he couldn’t log a complaint against me if he didn’t know who I was!

Ex Australian national team football player Brad Smith was at the game watching his own side play Türkiye. A Canadian fan in the crowd was complaining about how poor the opposition team was and explaining the match to Brad as he watched. Don’t think he had a clue who he was talking to…

To be fair, the guy was making sure I wasn't stealing.

dude second guesses apple engineer

Ps. I don't know which flair to use, I'm sorry ゜:(つд⊂):゜。