When at an open party at our university, my partner and I were talking to a guy we didn’t know. We both studied computer science and that made the guy think we would be really into computer hardware (a common misunderstanding). My partner knows next to nothing about computer hardware – he has only ever been interested in the software side. I used to work full time in a computer hardware store and, unlike my partner, have changed hardware on laptops and built a desktop computer from scratch using components I hand-picked myself. Yet, this stranger kept solely addressing my partner and looking at him while talking about hardware, even though my partner kept deferring to me and I also tried to interject with stuff like: “Yeah, there were actually quite a lot of recalls on that motherboard back when I worked for [company]”. The guy left the conversation after giving up on having a conversation about hardware with my partner, having pretty much only uttered a “hello” to me.
