[quote=“idonotlikeusernames, post:1839, topic:15992, full:true”]
You’re probably right and the grass is always greener on the other side, still I bet none of you tall people were ever told to go look if there was something comparable to what you actually wanted to buy available in the young teens department, and that one has happened to me a few times now. 
Nor does the Airforce refuse to even consider you as an officer candidate because you’re under 1.75m.
You’re also less likely to be overlooked, both literally and figuratively, or dismissed as a kid well into your twenties, by sales clerks at liquor stores and other adult shops and at night-clubs. At least until you begin to bald, at which point every guy you like will literally look down onto your balding head. In short, I hate being short. [/quote]
Being on the short side of the height scale myself, I can empathize. As the shortest kid in the class while growing up, I had to deal with plenty of much bigger bullies who thought I’d be an easy target. Thus at the beginning of nearly every year I got into fights as I refused to hand over my lunch money, crawl on my hands and knees, or otherwise be pushed around. I would have lost the fights if I had simply traded punches, as they were bigger and more easily able to take my shots than they I could theirs. So instead I struck fast, I struck hard, and I struck at parts of their bodies that were most vulnerable. The overwhelming majority of the time I waited for them to strike first so I’d have witnesses to the fact that the other kid started it and I would thus either evade or receive lighter punishment. Nevertheless I was always ready and waiting for it, ducked or side-stepped that first shot, and then went full wolverine on the other boy. On more than one occasion I sent the bully to the hospital. My fearsome rep (re)established, nobody would trouble me until some new bully who hadn’t been around for the last beat down attempted to push me around. In those days boys who told adults about bullies got treated like pariahs by the other boys for tattling, the adults didn’t do much, and the tattler was guaranteed to get the pulp beat out of them as a payback for tattling the second no adults were around. So there was little upside to telling the adults back then. As tragic as Columbine was, at least the powers that be in the US are taking bullying more seriously these days.
I found a way around getting continually carded. I grew a thick beard, and that allowed me to get into some places even before I reached the minimum drinking age… The beard also made me look less “pretty” and “delicate”, words I didn’t like hearing used to describe me.
The US Air Force has a minimum height requirement of 4’10", which is 147.3cm for those more comfortable with the metric system. The height minimum for pilots is a bit higher, 5’4", or 162.5cm. So you’d be fine on this side of the pond @idonotlikeusernames. Once upon a time, the US Navy had offered me an all expenses paid 4 year scholarship to one of the top ivy league schools in the country, and I turned them down. Every once in a blue moon, I think about how my life path could have been so vastly different had I accepted.
There seems to be something deep inside the human psyche that causes people to respect you more when you’re tall, and less when you’re short, and I suspect this lies at the heart of height discrimination. The phrases “look up to” and “look down on” demonstrate how deeply this sort of thinking is embedded within the language. This can affect pay. I could give anecdotes, but the statistics back this up as taller people are paid more for the same work. I’ve sometimes wondered how much this issue affects the pay disparity between men and women, as the average height for women is 6 inches shorter than the average height for men in the US.
I think the place where height has affected me most is in my romantic dealings with women. Height is a deal breaker for a lot of women in the relationship department. While I’ve long since made peace with my height, and have learned to compensate for it in most situations, I wouldn’t mind the greater variety of options I’d have romantically speaking were I taller.
