Th4t G1rl

To all the people I have ever interrupted, given bad ideas to, unnerved, was oblivious to, steamrolled over, or made feel uncomfortable, I am so, SO sorry.  I will try hard to never do it again.  I really will.

Mostly because I never want to be that girl*.

You know the one I'm talking about.  The one who sits up front and tries to interject frequently, under the muddled thought that talking equals participation.  The one who, when she raises her hand, the entire class rolls their eyes and sighs.  The one who doesn't realize how low everyone else's opinion of her actually is - or that they even dislike her at all.  The one who comes up with zany ideas that have little to no use in the group. The one who interrupts people constantly and delineates conversations.  The one who everyone is secretly hoping not to talk to.  Yeah, her.

She's making my life miserable.

In one of my classes the instructor assigned a SUPER PROJECT, with an importance level of over 9000, with field trips to find scholarly journals and everything.  Since the project is so big, our instructor gave us three weeks to work on it - and we plan on using all three weeks.  So we sat down yesterday and started the work, creating an outline of the first section of our presentation.  We got finished very shortly after it was done and were really pleased with ourselves - everyone was contributing and on top of what was happening.

And then she came.  40 minutes late, because she hadn't really read the e-mail that I sent out with directions to the spot that I had chosen to meet the night before. 

She immediately got there and told us that we needed to do an introductory exercise so we could get to know each other, making one of the guys in the group feel awkward enough that he got up and left "to go buy a coffee" and then "to go get napkins" when she still wasn't finished blathering on about it.  In addition, the group consists of students that already knew each other - we've contributed in class together all semester and had already been working together productively for a while.  But, no, that girl had to stop us working halfway through the session to introduce ourselves to each other.

Our entire meeting  went like that.  In the next hour, we managed to get next to nothing done.  By preempting her comments at the end, we did manage to get a schedule set, but by them most of the group members had checked out mentally, because they couldn't get a word in edge-wise.  Finally, we called it a day and walked out.

I really am dreading doing another group meeting, because I just really can't stand talking to her.  I don' think that I have enough patience to negotiate with her - I don't suffer fools gladly.  The other problem is that I can see myself doing the same sort of thing - our personalities are close to each other.  And I really hope I never was that girl or anything close to it.  And I am really, REALLY sorry if I was.

* I fully recognize that this sort of idiot could be either gender.  However, in this case, both the person featured in this rant and I are girls, so grammatically it flows better if the sentence is restrictive.