WTF?

Okay, I do not get this...

I headed down to our "mini vendeteria" (which is actually a pop machine and a snack machine). I wanted to buy some pretzels or chips or SOMETHING to supplement my lunch because, well, at 6:30 am when I normally pack it, I am NOT hungry, and very often at noon I open up the lunch kit and go, "Aw, man. Why didn't I pack more?"

(especially today - I teach until 5:20, have an off-campus meeting at 5:30, probably won't be home until 7:30 or later).

But anyway. The vendeteria. There was a girl there, standing right in front of the snack machine. Okay, I thought, I'll hang back, let her make her selection, and then do mine.

But she stayed there. Talking on her cell phone. Like she was guarding the dang machine (Seriously? If there was one Zinger left in there and she wanted it for her friend, she'd just have to tell me.)

But I'm not a bargey sort of person, so I wandered over to the water fountain ("....I'm just here to get a drink"), checked on the lab-setup in my lab, and then came back. Yup, still in front of the machine.

I suppose I would have been justified barging in but one of my little "issues" is that I don't like other people - especially women thinner than I - to see me getting snacks out of a vending machine. It feels so stereotypical: "Here's the fat chick totally dependent on the machine for her salt or sugar fix." (Yeah, I know. I have big problems about feeling that everyone's judging me.) But still. I'd like a little privacy to pick out my cheetoes or my Grandma Whoever's fakey-tasting faux-homestyle cookies.

Cell phones, I'm thinking more and more, are destroying simple manners in this country - it's as if everyone's enclosed in a bubble and no other people matter.

Hopefully she's left by now - so I can go get whatever salty thing (and whatever sweet thing) I want that the machine has.