The Street Savage

I have found that one way to bond with your classmates is to bitch about the one irritating classmate that the whole class absolutely despises. Let us, as a university, bond over that one student we’ve all had a class with–the one who should never have set foot in an academic setting.

Anonymous 1

Tell me a story about an annoying person that you’ve had a class with or someone who just irritated you.Actually it seems to me that no matter what class I have there’s always that one annoying person in the class… uhm, well this one particular psychology class, and it was a really bad class. I’ve taken a lot of really bad classes… We were talking about a theory that… I don’t remember the theory. It had something to do with where if you’re traumatized by something, say, you’re like eating something. You’re always gonna not wanna eat that food because you’re traumatized.

Like me and peanut brittle.Well, this girl raises her hand-this really annoying girl in class-she once said that she grew up in a cult… Uhm… she said, “Would that explain why every time I see a yellow notebook, I get really nervous?! I just… I can’t look at YELLOW NOTEBOOKS! I can’t because one time this one really horrible thing happened to me and it involved a yellow notebook!” I was thinking about bringing a yellow notebook and slamming it down on my desk and being like “Mmm! Yellow notebook!”

Any other ones? So, it’s actually the class I have next, it’s a psych class. My instructor’s from Germany. He’s like really old. He’s like 85, but not that thick of an accent. You can understand him. But sometimes he’ll like start speaking German in class. And he was counting in German, “He was like eins, zwei…” and this girl raised her hand and was like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about! Can you like speak in English or something, because you’re in AMERICA! You need to start talking ENGLISH!” And he was like “I like to count in German because it’s more precise.”

Anonymous 2

Gimmie a story about someone in one of your classes that irritated you. There was this guy in my Philip K. Dick class, I guess you’d call him a “modern-primitive” and he was always trying to drag everything back to the idea that he had that there was some kind of reincarnation, eternal life, cosmic crystal at the center of the Earth that you could reshape with good vibes and uh… to describe what he looked like, because his very appearance was annoying, he was uh… shaved accept for a little bit of a pony tail in the back.

So he had a rattail, huh? Well, it was a little longer than a rattail. He’d modify it by pinning it up in different formations, sometimes looking like half a ribbon, other times wrapped around his neck. (I kinda wanted to strangle him with it.)

[I laugh] This one event was really his fault; it bears mentioning. Our professor brought the I-Ching to class because we were reading The Man In The High Castle, which features the I-Ching prominently. Uhm… he tossed the pennies and we got to the segment called “Thunder and Lighting” and I believe the chapter had something to do with a child’s rag-ball lying on a rooftop in the rain. Now it was a fall term class, the skies were clear, I think it was about the second week of class so that would put us in mid-October. Now, he read this passage and suddenly the sky darkened and there was this fierce rainstorm for about five minutes and wouldn’t stop and the professor… this was very eerie… and my insane friend went crazy about this and eventually he went so crazy that he stopped coming to class. Being that the class had rather lax rules, he did not show up for about eight weeks of class. He showed at the end of the term and gave some presentation linking anime and Philip K. Dick and the aspects of his writing that non-science-fiction fans tend to latch onto. You know like, the “world,” “reality”–“What is reality?” “What is the nature of reality?” Ya know, is that phone booth really a phone booth? Maybe it’s a bush!

Or a hot dog. Yeah, and that had bothered me, because as a Philip K. Dick fan who’s read about 30 of Dick’s books, there was so much more in there that this guy overlooked. His constant desire to throw new age principles into science fiction rankles.

He just sounds like a big nerd! A big geek, yeah! Then next term he was in one of my classes and he introduced himself as a guy who didn’t believe in death. He’d just say things that were stupid.

Gimmie more irritating. Well, part of irritating people is forgetting… [looks over]… ya know there’s pizza on top of that garbage can over there, let’s go get it!

Anonymous 3

Have you ever had a class with someone who irritates you? Well this girl in one of my classes, she was really, really sick for a really long time but kept coming to class. And she would sit right behind me in this really small room and spread her germs. I could see her tainted hands reaching out to touch everything, coughing into her tainted hands and asking if she could borrow a pencil. And she was actually in one of my groups and I had to meet with her outside of class where she told me that she had been sick for a really long time, she was going to see the doctor. And it turned out that not only did she have strep throat, but she also had pneumonia! And she was like touching everything, and my germa-phobe self is like reacting to everything she does!

You said earlier that you are kind of sick, could it be because of this particular person? I am sick and I sort of blame it on her… maybe even for lowering my immune system from all that stress of worrying about her hands… I think I’ll just give her the evil eye the next time I see her.

Well, you shouldn’t be coming to class if you have pneumonia. Do you think you have pneumonia? No.

Well, that’s good… got any other stories? I was taking a Shakespeare class and a girl, uhm… the topic was postmodernism and she was like, “I took a class in postmodernism and all it means is that nothing has any meaning! It doesn’t mean anything!” And I said, “That’s not what postmodernism means. I don’t know who told you that but that’s not what it is.” She went “puh” like a balloon that just burst and sulked the rest of the class period and she never came back. I think she died. Nothing is worse than people being wrong about postmodernism. It’s such a buzzword.

Anonymous 3

Tell me a story about some irritating people you were in a class with. Okay, I took a film class called great directors and the first day of class the teacher gave us the syllabus and two women noticed that all the directors were white males. And they raised a ruckus about that. And the teacher asked them to name a director who’s a great director who is not a white male, and they were like, “Spike Lee.” And he said, “Well, his movies are okay…” And then I said “On the syllabus, we’ve got an Italian, a Swede, we got French people. It’s a very diverse syllabus.” And they were like [makes “I’m so offended” sound] and they dropped the class. Thank God.

Anonymous 4

Do you have annoying people that you’ve had classes with? I’ve had two classes with a woman who insists with every comment she makes, pointing out that she once lived in Europe. But it’s not one spot in Europe. It wasn’t just one spot in Europe, she would like move around constantly. She would tell the story every time about how her husband was in the military, therefore she gained all of this life experience through moving around in the military. It was really annoying.

It sounds annoying! And I’m really not lying, like it was every time.

Like everyday? I’d say about um… if we had the class two times a week, at least once a week. It was one of those things that you eventually stopped listening to. Like you’d start doodling, because you’d know she’d open her mouth.

Did anyone say anything to her? Eventually, my anthropology teacher would look over her like “…didn’t see that hand…” Nobody straight up said like, “Listen woman, we have heard this story over and over again. We all know your story!”

Do you think somebody should’ve? I think someone should have put an end to that woman’s discussion, yes.

Anonymous 5

Does anyone ever annoy you in class? I don’t like it when people sit in front of me and sit perfectly statuesque and then when they start talking they start bobbing their heads around. That’s the only thing that drives me nuts.

That’s a pretty weird pet peeve. Well, it drives me insane, I wanna whack them in the back of the head when they start doing it. I’m actually not that quite brutal but… sit in the back row a few times and you’ll want to finish your college career.

I always sit in the back row and I’ve never noticed that. What I hate is when people sit in front of me, but I’m self-absorbed like that, like the world should revolve around me. So why don’t you sit in the back of the room? I don’t anymore. I had to because I was late.

Have you ever said anything? I probably gave a couple of grievous sighs.

You probably made them really self-conscious because they were just doing what they were doing. I just think they’re kind of too pro-animated, I guess.

What does that word mean? It’s uhm… robotic. Like they’re perfectly still and then you press a certain button and then they start moving around, and you press again and then they stop.

I guess there’s a lot of cyborg people that go to this school.