Personal Space

Two of the girls in the class invited me to carpool with them from Oceanside to San Diego.  Yesterday was the first day carpooling with these ladies.

Of course like an idiot I took the wrong freeway exit in Oceanside and somehow managed to get routed over to Camp Pendelton where I had to explain to the soldier at the gates that I just needed to turn around since I was obviously going the wrong direction. I don't mind so much getting lost and having to figure out how to make the course correction, while privately acknowledging to myself that I'm a moron for not following my little mapquest directions more carefully. It's an entirely different feeling of humiliation when I'm forced to pull up, still clutching my mapquest direction in one hand, while I explain to someone else that I don't know what I'm doing.

I did manage to get back on track and meet up with the carpool group. I wasn't in the other woman's car very long before I started to worry that there may be something wrong with the car we were riding in. It kept lurching forward, in a very unnatural kind of way. I thought about saying something, but the driver seemed entirely unconcerned. That's when I started watching what was going on over there, and I realized that it wasn't a problem with the car at all. She would step on the gas quick and hard, and then let up completely until the car started to slow down below 60, and then hit the gas again. So we lurched our way down the 5 all the way to San Diego.

There was a new lady in class yesterday, and of course out of all the open seats in the room, she selected the one right next to me. At first this wasn't a problem, but when you're sitting on the front row of a class, with a guest speaker there in the middle of his presentation and the woman in her mid-thirties sitting next you starts passing you notes...it becomes an issue. I just wasn't going to be roped into that, so I wrote a one word little response to her question, shoved the paper back at her, and refused to take it back again. Undeterred she reached across me, snatched the notebook out of the hands of the lady on the otherside of me, wrote a note to her in the notebook and then passed it back. The lady to my left was no more a willing participant that I was, so the note passing was very short lived. Instead, this woman's new form of entertainment was to ask so many questions, irrelevant questions, of the presenter that everyone in the class wanted to hurt her, including the presenter. I think the deputy district attorney that didn't even make it halfway through his powerpoint presentation before 9, because he was answering questions that were not at all relevant to subject matter wanted to reach over and strangle her. That was bad, but the worst part is that she has no concept of personal space. During the break she leaned over to talk to me, and her face was so close that I couldn't even see what she looked like, she was just this big blurry mass coming right at me. I saw her do the same thing to a few other people, and while it's kind of funny to watch it happening to other people, it's not at all funny when you're the one going cross-eyed trying to focus in on her.

After class we were back in the car for maybe 5 seconds before somebody let loose with "I can't take it. I don't want to hear ONE more question out of that woman's mouth. She's turned this from an interesting experience into a nightmare for all of us." It's kind of true. We've all got our fingers crossed that the staff person in charge of training will do something to address the issue before Saturday. Eight straight hours of her and I'm confident that some people will quit, and I'm being serious. It's that bad...