So, I was at a conference during the latter part of last week, and I’m telling you, you don’t want to EVER sit next to me during a conference. I didn’t get crazy with the elbows, talk during the presentations or fart, but I did get annoyed. I always get annoyed with at least one person who sits next to me…unless we’re friends, of course.
This time, the woman next to me was a teacher from a private school near Chicago who couldn’t imagine that things might be different outside her little reality. Like, yeah, GIRLS do fight in the hallways where I work. Not daily, normally, but they do. My biggest concern isn’t that a few freshmen drop candy wrappers near their lockers.
Or, yeah, it’s not really all that normal to sell yearbooks to all but 20 of the 600 students in your school–I’m proud of my 65% sell rate and it’s not that the book is bad that I don’t sell as many as she. It’s because some of my kids really DON’T have the money to do it–or parents who buy them for them.
Oh, and the concern that my school would be concerned about the fact that I wasn’t going to attend the evening dinner because I’d rather go back to my sister’s house (the sister who was housing me for the night) and catch up? Get over it, woman. I was there for the entire day AND I didn’t ask the district to pay for a hotel room. I think they’ll handle that I decided to eat pizza with my family instead of sitting next to her and eat prime rib (blech, blech).
Christ.
The rest of the conference was nice, but I had this overwhelming wish to take control of the LCD projector, log into Flickr and force the participants to sit through slideshows of J while I talked about how wonderful he is and played recordings of his musical stylings.
I’m becoming one of THOSE people.
starfish says:
I hate when you get annoying neighbors at conferences. Either they are WAY to into the whole thing, or they are way NOT into it, making you get up every minute to let them out of the row.
March 9th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
phyllis says:
ooh i am such a bad conference attender too. at the last one i was at, luckily, i was asked to be part of the blogging team…this was just license for me to buy wireless access in the convention center and sit with my laptop in all the sessions…rock on! in fairness, i did blog a ton:-) but i managed to skip a bunch of sessions in lieu of “networking” coffee meetings…
March 9th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Michelle says:
I’m the same way. For some reason, I always have at least one annoying conference neighbor.
March 9th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Carrie says:
Funny! I think you should have stormed the LCD projector and shown pics of J. He’s much cuter and more interesting than whatever was going on at the time, I’m sure.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:07 am