but putting on 40 pounds really helped fix that! But I still get carded even when I tell the waitresses that I’m older than they are.

I don’t really attempt to counteract it too much. I dress and act appropriately for work, I’m good at my job and I hold and give intelligent opinions. The biggest problem is that I sound like a 12 year old on the phone. I think that disturbs people, but I’m not really sure how or whether I want to change that.

Fortunately (!) I’ve started going grey, so I guess this will wear off in a few years. Unless I take my sister’s advice to just pluck all the grey out.

* working in smaller places, where people quickly learned what my abilities were

* becoming the “expert” on new areas and policies–everyone realized I was the go-to person

* working in academic areas where young people get a lot of respect; it’s not so bad to be mistaken for a student if students are seen as near-colleagues to start with and you can laugh it off together

* dressing a little nicer than everyone else, especially at first

* taking the initiative to speak first, introduce myself, etc., to avoid people putting their feet in their mouths. This also works at the liquor store–I usually pay when my partner is with me. He’s three years older than I am, but often gets mistaken for my father.

* having a sense of humor about it, even if I need to “vent” about it later

If you meet someone who seems “too young,” I totally agree about not saying how the person will “appreciate it later.” (Frankly, I doubt that I will unless I start processing my hair–gray hair trumps all else, and my mother was already completely gray in her 40’s.) Better approaches are to just apologize (“So sorry, thought you were younger….”) and maybe compliment the person in the here-and-now (“you do have such nice hair, though”) or joke about it (“guess I need to get my eyes checked”). Best one I’ve heard: “Oh, you look so young, you must be keeping yourself really healthy!” And please don’t try to convince me my driver’s license is fake–no, really, I was there. It scares me that this might happen with the police or someone similar.

Fitwallet, when I was in college, I went back to visit my high school, and they thought I was a visiting 8th grader!

I was a manager in retail for a while and it was horrible because not only was everyone taller than I was but most of them were older and saw me as one of the high school kids who worked over the summer.

On the other hand this youthful face gets me to pay kids price at certain events so it is not all bad. :-)

I found that wearing make-up or high heels or anything else that I thought of as grown up actually made things worse. I got a lot more comments about how young I looked when I did those things. I think it just made me look like I was trying to look like a grown up.