War Rants

Things that are pissing me off:

1) Dorks that take pictures of every slide being shown during a talk. Hey, how about paying attention instead of blocking my view there r tard? Bad enough that they knock you out of the way so they can get 100Mega pixel shots of posters to recreate all the fun at home, but now I have to put up with flashes and fake camera noises whilst I'm trying to follow a presentation? And god forbid the speaker should use a lot of animations. The poor bastards can't keep up.

2) The current US-Canada exchange rate. OK George, this week dollar thing has gone too far. Now I'm not saying we need the glory days of when you could get $1.40 for your greenback dollar in the Great White North, but the usual $1.20 rate would be fine. They were offering 3 cents to the dollar at Niagra falls. Why even bother? 3 cents? Canadians better be buying a lot of our crap for this outrage.

Thing That Cracked Me Up:

Some poor bugger asked a question in million-syllable-per-second psuedo English following a presentation. Despite the rapid rate, the dude took a good minute and half to spit out his query, and was answered only with a hostile-sounding "WHAT?". It was the same tone you might expect if your father found out you were preggers in high-school, or that you had wrecked his car. AnOs and I struggled not to laugh too loud, and would repeat the shout at others all week long. Later on, a more polite speaker would simply point out that he couldn't understand the poor fellow. Anyway, if you're keeping score at home, the correct meeting manner is to reply "I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?" and act like his mike isn't working too well. If this fails, simply say "Yes that's a very interesting question, we're working on that right now, so maybe at the next meeting we can answer that."