Obnoxious. Just plain obnoxious.

Ok, so I now have a heaping _pile_ of stuff to read and write up. I mean a literal mountain. As if I am ever going to make it through this all. But that's ok. :-) I guess it could be worse. In all honesty, when I get this stuff, I'm not whiny. I save my whining for here. I'm doing basically ok, with the slight exception of one of my coworkers annoying me. It's been snowballing. I mean a lot. We went out to dinner the other night, and I realized that she's one of those people who really talks down to servers--hence my previous post. She has a lot of other obnoxious habits, but they'd just annoyed me in the background before. Our server came over and she literally didn't let him finish saying hi before she made a comment about how he took a long time to get to us.

Now, I've been a server before; it's not something I was all that good at, or should/would probably ever do again, but I feel for them. Most are doing their best, have a lot of crap going on you will never know about (I could tell you some horror stories...), and are nice people. Sure, there are some bad ones, but that's true anywhere. But anyway--back to my story: So she starts fussing about the amount of time it took to get to us. In fairness, it was a bit of a wait, but the place was slammed. So he apologizes, and most of the meal goes well enough, although she made another nasty comment when he didn't bring her a second drink after she'd asked (I figure he forgot, and that falls under "no big deal"). Then when he went to clear her soup, the laws of physics intervened, and her spoon fell off the plate and into her lap. My god, you would think that this was a beheadable offense. I pointed out that it would probably wash out just fine, to which she started griping that that wasn't the point. Ok, so what _is_ the damn point? I got embarrassed, and apologized to him, and that just made her worse. I mean, you would think she was trying to get some knocked off the bill or something the way she was carrying on. I'm not trying to ascribe a tacky motive to her, but the whole thing was very tacky; there's no way to make it otherwise. I ended up tipping way more than normal on the whole bill, because we'd split the check, and she wasn't tipping him at all, then she got irritated that I _did_ tip him (I made damn sure she couldn't see how much), as if I'm supposed to support her in her nuttiness.

This nastiness-to-those-we-perceive-as-beneath-us thing has happened a couple of times before, and I guess I'd excused it as being semi-legitimate irritation, or a bad day, or something--but now I see the pattern. The semi-legitimate irritation, to me, is a personal-interpretation thing. I'm not going to trounce all over someone else's right to be ticked off, it's still a free country. We'd gone to get coffee--you know, at one of those coffee places that take your scoop of coffee, spread it out on a frozen marble slab, and mix in Oreos and whatnot...oh, wait--that's those trendy ice cream places...nevermind. Anyway, we go to CoffeeCool-O-Rama, where I get a coffee, and she gets a quintuple mocha tequila sunrise soy nut cherry surprise toffee crunch caramel latte, size veni vidi vici, with extra whipped and Doritos on top. Or whatever. And, in her eyes, there wasn't enough Doritos, or caramel, or some central ingredient. So instead of asking politely for an extra handful of crumbled Doritos, or sloosh of caramel, or both, she goes back up to the Caffinette (trademarked job title of CoffeeCool-O-Rama employees, of course) and starts off her polite request with "You messed up my latte; you must be new." Well, call me petty, but I wouldn't have reacted any differently from the Caffinette; she was a little offended, and while the Caffinette fixed it, they traded little catty comments back and forth ("I'm not new, maybe you mis-ordered"; "I never mis-order, maybe you should check your manual of how these are made", etc...). But I figured since no one threw any quintuple mocha tequila sunrise soy nut cherry surprise toffee crunch caramel latte, size veni vidi vici, with extra whipped and Doritos on top into anyone else's face, well...no harm done. :-) But now I see the trend.

Why do I feel the need to vent in epic detail? Because I find it actually very annoying. I mean, mostliest because it's just hurtful. Thirdliest because it embarrasses me. Those are the two easy ones. Secondliest, the difficult one, is because it makes it seem like this person is like, Queen of The World (or thinks she is, rather), and let me tell you--at the restaurant the other night, I wanted to throttle her. I am just mystified at a bunch of things that fall under secondliest: Why do people put up with this? Where does one get the idea in the first place that you can do this? Why isn't there more reward in being a nice person? I guess this is the big one that makes Secondliest hard for me to wrap my mind around. Deep down, I feel like there's no real reward in being nice. But as for me, I feel like I have no choice. Like at dinner--I can't not tip. I can't not apologize. I would have felt guilty for weeks, and I'm serious; I would feel like I had done it. And I don't like making others feel bad about themselves...I don't know. I don't know what it is. But it's annoying, and it's also annoying when she interrupts people, or finishes their sentences (especially when she's wrong about what they were going to say, which is often), and so on, and so on... I should not be so emotionally invested in what other people do, true, but I am. Not that I know why, really. But nevertheless, now I'm eagerly awaiting her getting the swift kick in the pants she so richly deserves. What else can I do? I mean, how do you tell someone that they're completely obnoxious?