Oh my GOSH, you're PREGNANT!

Ok, so I'm at work, sitting at my little cubicle, doing what I normally do (surfing the net and reading the news), when a colleague from the ground floor comes up and greets me. We get to chatting, and he mentions that another colleague -Lets call her Mrs. XYZ- starts her maternity leave from tomorrow.

So I ask a couple innocent questions you would THINK a normal person would ask, such as, 'How long will she be gone for?'. My colleague answers, 'Oh, maybe a month or two'. I say, 'Cool, how far along is she?', to which he responds with a confused look. I clarify myself a bit more, and I ask him how many months she is. He thinks I'm asking about her maternity leave months again. I tell him, 'No, I mean how many months pregnant is she?'. His look of confusion turns to that of disbelief, 'Errrr, I don't know, how should I know?'. I leave that question alone.

Next, I ask, 'Is it a boy or a girl?'. This question is followed by silence. Then a workmate from the adjacent cubicle pipes up with 'Yaar, what kind of question is that?'. I tell him it's a straightforward legitimate question. He tells me that it is inappropriate and who knows if it is a boy or girl, because you cannot ask the soon-to-be-mother. This time my face contorts to that of sheer disbelief and I am almost burning with fury at this point. I ask both these idiots how they find my questions as inappropriate. If the parents do not want to know the gender of the child till he/she is born, then that's okay, but that doesn't mean you cannot ask them if they know the gender yet. They will tell you if they know or don't know, but do you think they'll get mad or something? Do they think that if it's a boy and they tell you, that it's manhood will suddenly invert and he will become a she?

What the hell is so inappropriate about asking the mother how many months pregnant she is? The only explanation I can come up for it is that then people will know how many months ago they consummated their relationship and then they will be ashamed. If that's the case, then WHAT THE %$#@!?!! So, if you don't tell people how many months pregnant you are, then no one will know you had sex, eh, and the baby just magically popped outta you because that's what happens when you're married?

And what the hell is so wrong about asking the gender of the child? What is wrong with this stupid country? You idiots still live in the stone age or what? I mean, I could understand people in villages acting this way, and I would be totally fine with it, because those people are closely linked with their cultural ties and they have been living like that for a long time. However, for someone living and working in the capital, in an international organization, to act this way is ludicrous.

I could not believe such simple issues were considered taboo. I wanted to knock both of them out. Ignorant bloody twits! No wonder we get stomped on by the rest of the world. No wonder we are considered and treated like savages. Today's incident was a real wake up call for me to our current reality. I am drowning in a pool of morons and imbeciles.