At the risk of alienating some of the more important people in my life including my husband, my boss, most of the venture capitalists who I dutifully represent on a daily basis, many of my closest friends, a number of fellow bloggers, surely a good percentage of MoB readers, and I think Jennifer, I would like to share with you one of my biggest pet peeves, of which all of the aforementioned are guilty. Here goes:
I don’t care about what you recently heard on NPR.
Perhaps I should rephrase. I might care about what you heard on NPR depending on the topic. What I really don’t care about is THAT YOU HEARD IT ON NPR.
I know you are part of the elite intelligentsia. That is why I like you. Therefore I don’t need to know that you are a regular listener of put me to sleep talk radio.
You know these people, right? Or there is a very good chance you are one of them. You are having a casual conversation with them, maybe it’s about the fact that your children can’t seem to get along, and then it happens.
“You know the other day when I WAS LISTENING TO NPR I heard a story about how the Ancient Mayans used to use an advance form of biofeedback to instill harmony among family members.”
My question to those who engage in this behavior is why can’t you just say you heard it on the radio?
I’ll tell you why. There is a certain snob appeal of NPR. It is your way of letting us all know that, when driving in the car you prefer to better yourself and become more informed about the world around us. Good for you! Those of us who just like to bop along to plain old music are the equivalent of cerebral Neanderthals. I am not ashamed of it. I know there is a Saturday Night Live skit in here somewhere.
So the next time you’re tempted to cite NPR in conversation, perhaps you will cite another trusted source and say the following instead:
“You know the other day, I was reading MoB and I heard that constantly referring to NPR stories is pretentious…do you agree?”
Do you?
And as far as the uniform described in the top comment (so funny!) of NPR listeners- Good Lord I’m so opposite. ps. My dad is a regular listener as well and hasn’t any higher education than high school.
