people that you meet

photo by Stephan Ridgway by use under cc license

Recently, I was having a discussion with an unemployed software developer. I will refer to him as X (just so we're clear, "X" is not his real name).

X had a few words to say about taxes and the attempts to nationalize health insurance; he was against both. I didn't get to dig much deeper because we were in the midst of discussing something else, but I did disagree with him immediately on the latter point, since I am perfectly happy to try nationalizing health insurance. He later mentioned to me that while he was unemployed, a huge part of his health insurance was being covered by the government-run stimulus plain. He seemed to be happy about that.

X told a story about a guy he knows who is on disability, who gets all of his health care provided for by the government, and who, in addition, is taking off for a three-week vacation. I wasn't quite sure what the moral of his story was. But it sounded a lot like he was ranting about how such people cheat the government and steal his tax money.

X is taking a few weeks of vacation in August. He indicated that he was planning on drawing unemployment compensation while he's on vacation. I urged him not to, pointing out that it's illegal and unethical.

While discussing these things, I tried to keep polite when disagreeing. My natural tendency in such situations is to avoid conflict, neither disagreeing or agreeing, and to move the conversation along away from hot-button issues. And later, I try to avoid getting into discussions with the person. Possibly I'm overly non-confrontational (<sarcasm>is that because I'm female?</sarcasm>), but I don't see any point in getting into random arguments with strangers. I'm not sure what to do in this case. I met X at a professional meeting, and was hoping that he'd be a good networking contact, but I think I was mistaken. This most recent conversation gave me a pretty big "ick" factor. How picky should you be with your networking contacts, anyway?