Essentially all my young life I was treated like a dork because I was finding ways to reuse containers for lunch rather than get disposables. This is going back well before it was common knowledge.

Yes I was that person who had my own cotton mesh bags for veggies. Yes I got a lot of judgy looks especially from the middle aged ladies. I just embraced being seen as a dork. Figured out early I wanted to be on right side of history even if that meant I wasn’t ‘cool’. As far as I cared, this Shit went beyond me and my ego/confidence.

Now those who called me a dork not only pretend like it didn’t happen but often pass on unsolicited information to me about reuse that is now very common knowledge.

Current day I’m like yea… you have to wash it because reuse isn’t just reuse. It’s also wash well to reuse so you don’t get sick. And occasionally you stil have to throw things out that become contaminated. This part still isn’t ‘common knowledge’ yet…smh.

As a Maths teacher, almost daily 😂

Plenty of times. But that’s not the same as the other party accepting the fact :o) I’ve also been proven wrong many times. The way the question is posed implies that this is a rare occurance?

Once when I was little my mom was yelling at me about something or other. In the heat of the moment she called me a son of a bitch, and I went “Oh?” with a single eyebrow raised over a smirk. She laughed, and that stopped the yelling.

Wait, does being funny enough to distract someone equal winning an argument? In my universe it does

Every time. Especially anonymously on the Internet.

Of course, the other person may remain rooted in their ignorance and fallacy, but that’s their loss.

It’s the usual thing.

Many times. It’s never as rewarding as you’d like, because the other party is rarely objective, and thus rarely acknowledges their defeat.

It’s usually better to ease up when you get close to a total victory and allow the opponent to save face.

After all, no matter how objectively correct you are, if you don’t change the other person’s position even a little, you’re just wasting time.

What kind of question is this? 😆 I think everyone older than 6 regularly does that. Especially when planning things and disagreeing and then you get to learn who was right. And even the kids like to bet who is right and then they look it up, ask someone or try it and one of them will have this as an outcome…

I work in IT. More specifically I work in Networking. So every fucking day.

Best one was when I was working for an internet provider. Customer was complaining every other day their internet was not working to spec. They ordered a 100Mb service and could never get more than around 60Mb. Somehow they got it into their head that our on prem gear was the issue. But our on prem gear was gigabit capable.
But they never listened and eventually it got to the point where ceo to ceo calls were happening.
My ceo managed to make them agree to a call out where if no problem was found in our gear they would pay the $120 callout plus time for the 2 hour drive to the customer office but if I found a problem on their side we would compensate them for the services until it performs as ordered.

I get there plug my laptop into their network and sure enough I get 60Mb speed tests. Moved my cable from their firewall to the spare port on our gear and get the full speed.
They wanted me to do the tests a few more times and I do and get the same result.
I looked up the spec sheet of their firewall and third line down of the throughput graph shows their setup only has a rated capacity of about 60Mb. Never heard a peep from them after that.

One example comes to mind where I almost did.

I used to drive an older Pontiac. It wasn’t the fanciest car, so it wasn’t the most performant.

One day, I was leaving a restaurant with a girl I was dating, and had to merge into traffic up a hill. I knew the car would need all the power it could get to do the merge safely, so I turned off the air-conditioning. Confused, the girl asked why I did that. I explained that air conditioning affects the performance of the car. She disagreed. She was raised a bit privileged and had only ever driven nice cars, so never noticed the performance hit of having the A/C on.

We bickered back and forth for a minute or two before I said “okay look I’ll show you” and reached to turn off the A/C. Before I could, however, she hit me with “you know, you don’t always have to be right”. I didn’t end up getting to prove it to her.

In her defense, I can be very stubborn when its something I am confident I’m correct in, and we actually argued a lot about stuff. Another example of an argument we had was over the fact that prairie dogs can carry the plague. She didn’t believe me and I remember we had to look up the answer. And that was on our second date.

I think about that line she hit me with a lot. But I also realize that in a lot of our “arguments” I was still having fun. To me, there’s a playful aspect to a good argument. As long as nobody is yelling or getting feelings hurt, it’s a fun way to pass the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize she wasn’t having fun like I was.

In the 2nd grade. When we got to school each morning we went to our classrooms and dropped off our stuff, then we went to the gym to wait for school to start. I was in a split class (2nd & 3rd grade in the same room) and while in the gym a 3rd grader came up and asked me what I’d do if my box of crayons went missing. I had the Crayola 128 mega box, with attached sharpener… top of the line.

Of course, when I get to class, my crayons are missing, and Tommy has a box in his desk. I walk over and tell him to give me my crayons and he says they are his. A fight is brewing, so other kids gather round. I reach down and grab the box from his desk and put them behind my back, then simply ask “If these are your crayons, where did you get them?” and he replied “My mom bought them for me at Piggly Wiggly”… I pulled the box from my back and showed everyone the ‘Wal-Mart’ sticker on the back. Then I put my crayons back in my desk.

I was always a small kid, always being picked on… this was one of my few wins as a kid and it felt so good.

I would think so, at least for knowledge-based ones. Thinking about this out loud, it’s hard to feel I can claim certainty given anything seems to have the potential to remind me of the adage that one can never be certain of anything. However, there are a handful where this doubt is completely obsolete, typically because I’m talking to someone who doesn’t seem to know the answer is an obvious part of life for me. I have been wrong before and will mention so within reason (as in based on a battle of experience/testimony/proofs/contradictoriness in its equivalent to PEMDAS).

only in the shower, two days later.

Yes. My company wanted me to get a corporate credit card with Bank of America. I said absolutely not, they have a terrible reputation and I want nothing to do with them. In response, I was told in an email (which was Cc-ed to some VP of Finance) that this wasn’t true, and that Bank of America has a great reputation.

Now, if you’re gonna claim I’m wrong and start cc-ing people, you better be able to back it up. This pissed me off, so I googled for lists of the worst banks in America. Of the three first surveys on the topic that I found, two of them had Bank of America as the “top spot” as worst bank, and the third one had it in third place. I emailed this back to the person. I never heard back. I happily continued not using their corporate credit card ever after.

One time my dad and I were in Mexico looking for some glue to fix a chair. So walking into town, I said we need to look for Kola Loka—spelled with Ks. My dad said “Nonsense! It would be spelled with Cs.” Neither of us had seen how Krazy Glue is marketed in Spanish, but I could’ve put money on that spelling. I should’ve, because I was right dammit! And dad, who is a linguist, grudgingly admitted, “All right, I suppose you may have some linguistic talent too.” It was the only time I ever won an argument with him over anything having to do with language.