A couple of months ago, I read about bizarre incident in an advice column. The person who wrote in was troubled by the damage he had caused to one of his friendships, and he was wondering what he could do to fix things. Apparently, he was visiting his friends, a married couple, and excused himself to use the washroom. While he was in the washroom, he thought it would be a good idea to rummage through the medicine cabinet in search of something that he could tease his friends about, such as Rogaine or something "hilarious" like that. On the top shelf of the medicine cabinet, he found a pregnancy test. It had already been used, and it was displaying a positive result. This person then returned to the dinner party, and informed the other guests that the host couple were pregnant. Within a few days, the couple were being congratulated by all their friends on a pregnancy that no one was supposed to know about. No one was supposed to know about the pregnancy because the couple were no longer pregnant. They had miscarried. The couple know that it was the nosey, blabbermouth guest who passed around the information, but they do not know how he knew that they were pregnant in the first place. This guest then wrote to the advice columnist to figure out how to fix the friendship.
I think it is obvious that there are sooooo many things wrong with what the "friend" did here, but it was the words of the columnist that kind of surprised me. He talked about human nature, and how it is normal to want to snoop around someone else's personal belongings. The columnist also described a similar incident where he overheard a guest going through his medicine cabinet, and even heard this guest pull back the shower curtain as if expecting to see a dead body in the bathtub or something. The columnist also added that since it is human nature to snoop, he couldn't help but wonder if the couple with the pregnancy test wanted the test to be found, since they left it lying around when guests were expected. Lying around??? It was in the medicine cabinet!!! Should people really be expecting that their guests will really go snooping in there? It has never occurred to me to do this to someone, or that someone would do it to me. Nice job on blaming the victim here, don't you think? Do any of you have any experience with something like this? The columnist was implying that it is an everyday occurrence. Is it?
2 comments:
OK - I have snooped before BUT OMG THAT WAS SOOOOOO WRONG! The fact that this person babbled someone else's deeply-personal, super private news IS WRONG NO MATTER WHAT.
Sheesh... those columnists sometimes miss the mark and suck the big one.
Holy crap! That is sooo wrong. That poor couple. I can't even imagine how they felt, suddenly having to explain to everyone something they obviously wanted to keep private. I cannot imagine why anyone would assume that if it was in the medicine cabinet someone might want it to be found. Wha??? I can't imagine snooping in someone's medicine cabinet, nor have I ever put stuff away from my cabinets to avoid it being found (isn't that what cabinets are for?!)
On a related note, I once heard of people putting marbles in the medicine cabinet so that if people snooped they would be busted. What an awesome idea!
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