What did I do wrong?

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I thought I would start a thread where people could relate a past incident when they knew they had committed some social faux pas but honestly didn't understand what they had said or done that was so wrong. Times when it's clear you've done something judging from the negative reactions of others.

Here's one of mine:
Years ago I was working as a night manager at a bar. After hours when everyone was relaxing with a beer a group of us were sitting in a booth and chatting. One of the kitchen guys, who was African American was dating a white woman and mentioned that his girlfriend's father was a GrandPoobah in the KKK in the next state over. I said" My God, Juan, be careful, those people are dangerous." Immediately everyone(except Juan) started shooting me dagger looks and making shut up gestures with their hands. I liked Juan and I know everyone else there did too. What did I do wrong? The fact that I was manager was not important. It wasn't that kind of place and I had been promoted after years as a bar grunt on the day shift.

This is incredibly common and barely counts as a faux pas because it isn't preventable. Sometimes I've been the one doing it. Sometimes I've been the one making frantic but subtle "shut up" gestures to the person who just did it. It's so common that it shows up a lot in movies and TV.

Here's how it happens: there is a long and involved situation going on that you have no way of knowing about. The people around you are aware of the situation because they are involved in it in some way or have just spoken to or about the involved person. I can make some random guesses about the situation in your anecdote. Maybe he and his girlfriend had just gotten into an "almost broke up" argument about that very subject and he was talking about it to his co-workers and his feelings were very raw and they didn't want you stirring it up again. Maybe he had instead gotten into a confrontation with the father and was very much on edge and his co-workers were afraid your comment would tip him over some sort of edge. Those are just random guesses. In the long run, it doesn't matter. There is no way that everybody can know everything about everybody else's situations so this sort of thing happens all the time.

The important thing is that you read their non-verbals correctly and dropped the subject. Their non-verbals were meant as damage control to prevent a very, very minor social faux pas from exploding into something really ugly. There would have only actually been a problem if you had not understood their non-verbals and kept on talking to him about it.

My own most recent example of this was saying to a co-worker "I haven't seen X (her husband) in a while. How is he doing?". Her friends gave me the "stop talking about that now!" non-verbals and I dropped the subject. I later found out her husband had been cheating on her and she was in a lot of pain over it. Any affable mention of her husband stirred up raw feelings.

They probably saw it as taboo. Or something they didn't want to get involved in.

If I were in that situation, I would wonder if all those coworkers were Klansmen by night. That is just too weird. I don't get why they would disagree with you saying it unless Juan's gf was ashamed of her Grandfather being in the organization or the family doesn't like Juan. Obviously, if she is dating him, she doesn't share her Grandfather's views. Maybe the coworkers thought it was an insult to the gf, judging her by something she had no control over, what her Grandfather did before she was born?

I think that first explanation was right, not that the others weren't but there's no need to repeat. Usually those signals mean exactly that, there's something you don't know, and usually couldn't know, that makes that a bad subject to bring up. It's usually OK to take one of the others aside later to ask what was up about Juan and the KKK thing if you want to know.

A female client came into the office for a meeting with me. We'd been talking over the phone for a couple of weeks since our first in-office meeting, and she was coming in to pick up the final artwork that I'd been working on over that time.

She brought a small 3yo child with her. I asked her "is that your grandson?"

It was her son.

I spent the next five minutes back-pedaling furiously and trying to explain why I'd made that assumption while avoiding the actual reason I'd made the assumption.

This still happens when I think about it :-