Have you ever been patronized, and if so how often?

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Spoken down to, treated as though you were stupid or a small child. The people at my uni's disability office are horrible about this.

Yup, I've been patronized a lot, though I doubt to the levels of some of the people here.

Pretty much my entire high school, the joys of having a genius intellect with a large interest in science in a school in Wyoming that puts sports first and foremost (our swimming team getting 14th place in the state got an assembly while my Science Bowl team representing the entire state in the national competition, winning the school thousands of dollars didn't get so much as a mention in the morning announcements). The peak was when the principal blew me and my mom off for coming to him when the school mixed up my SAT scores with some screw off that happened to have the same first and last name as me. On the plus side, he was forced by the superintendent to write us a letter of apology to us after that incident.

I also got to enjoy plenty of patronizing while working at Target, both by customers and management. A lot of the customers assumed that, because I was working in Target, I was an inferior being and deserved to be treated as such, even though I was just working there while getting my engineering degree. Then there was the ample amounts of management that rolled through the store in Albany, OR. It was a hub for training fresh college grads, so it was a constant stream of people abusing their newly-found power. The worst was the store manager that treated me like an inbred hick, just because I was from Wyoming, going so far as to constantly call me "Bubba".

Then of course, there's my dad. Who doesn't enjoy the constant subtle hints that someone's obviously superior to you? I say this sarcastically, since he's a short, bald, pot-smoking college dropout that's currently married to a money-suckling whore.

I made a song lol (same tune as britney womanizer)

you say you try to help ah ah
I know just what you are-are
you you youah
you you youah
patronizer patronizer patronizer

I wouldn't really be complaining about that. I would have much preferred having a few overprotective students on my side rather than getting teased with the most supportive thing being said by other students going along the lines of "hey guys, cut it out, do you want him to shoot up the school? Hey (my name), if you ever do decide to shoot up the school just remember I was on your side kay?".

Anyway, all of the patronizing I can recall getting treated with has been in the form of getting treated like a kid (I've always looked 3-4 years younger than I really am). For example, I had this grad student english teacher my freshman year of college who talked to all of her students as if we were five years old. On the plus side she was really lenient with grading too, so those were two of the easiest A's I've ever earned (yeah, I took her for both English I and II. She was attractive and her class difficulty was a joke, which was more than enough for me to look past her patronizing attitude).

Also, I still have to go to my orthodontist to get my retainers tweaked every now and then (I'm 21) and I get treated like a kid the whole time I'm there (probably due to the fact that the typical patient there is a young teen). It doesn't help that I can look as young as 15 sometimes either.

And one of the more degrading experiences I've had with patronizing was back when I was 17 and only a few days away from turning 18 and had to fly across the country to visit family. The airline I rode on had this mandatory policy that all minors under 18 flying alone had to be put on this unaccompanied minors program, which was essentially babysitting by the stewardesses. You can see where this is going. I'm not going to go into much detail because it was pretty damn humiliating, though to give you guys a taste of what I dealt with the lead stewardess of the plane kept referring to all the unaccompanied kids on that flight as "babies".

During a parent-teacher night, my art teacher said to me "Now, I hear you are a smart cookie." I think he was trying to make me feel better about the fact I was struggling at art but I really didn't need any cheering up as it was.

The thing that made this patronisation so bad though was that I was seventeen years old at the time, well beyond the age that it is reasonable to be called a "smart cookie".