Being petty

I am going to stoop here. Stoop far. I really try not to make snap judgments about people, but this one was too much to pass up.

I am sitting in teleconference today, I missed last week because I was in class. There is a new post-doc on the project and I had not met her yet. In she walks. My guess is that she is 30-35 years old. She smiles and comes and sits next to me at the ever shrinking table (as the project shrinks we keep moving to smaller conference rooms).

My first thought is, "wow, she likes pink". She has a hot pink shirt on, jeans and hot pink VELCRO tennis shoes. Like the ones I had when I was 12. Her hair is poodle style permed and she has the front pulled up on the top of her head with a hot pink scrunchy so it cascades down the side of her face. I am kicking myself for making snap judgments about her based upon her 1985 outfit. (Does that redeem me at all?)

This is where it gets worse. She pulls out a very large cell phone, my guess is it was one of the first generation picture phones. It is encased in pink plastic. She props it up on the very small table we are all squishing around with laptops and lab notebooks and brings up a freakin' picture of her pug "so he can watch". The mongo cell phone sits there the.entire.teleconference with her pug staring at me. Great restraint was taken so as that I didn't "accidentally" send the thing flying across the room.

I was both embarrassed for the girl and thrilled that our teleconference is not a videoconference. Does she really expect me to take her input on this project seriously? (Oh and the jeans... camels toe AND muffin top. That just cannot be comfortable and jeans are supposed to be comfortable.)

I will now return to my realm of being nice... relatively.