pathetic peoplehood and computer lab ettiquette

It's been a busy week. Presentation tuesday, and i just finished a paper about five hours ago. Tuesday afternoon, around 1 PM, I was sitting in the ITS computer lab in the school of ed. building finishing up my presentation on CLR James for my postcolonial Marxism class. Because of the ADD, i get all sensitive to noise when i'm trying to write stuff i have to ocncentrate real hard on (not like blog entries,) and sometimes people in that lab are very loud, in which case sometimes i do my little mutter-scowl barely passive-aggressive schtick for a few seconds until I catch myself, reqalize I'm only an old man in Julie Math (fast approaching the big 9-0) and then get back to work. Tuesday was different.

An undergrad - a woman with long curly hair in hipster/olsen twin garb sat down immediately next to me and started a very loud and clearly unimportant conversation. Nothign worng with unimportant loud cell phone conversations. I have many of them myself. Just not in computer labs where phones are banned. Perhaps I should have been more diplomatic than I was, but given her response, in retrospect, I really doubt it would have helped. In a slightly frustrated tone, I said, "You know, you really can't talk on the phone in here." This was an accurate claim. I've seen ITS employees say the same thing to offenders numerous times. The woman, not missing a beat or averting her eyes from her screen, said loudly and ina disgusted tone to whover was on the other end of her telephone conversation, "Ok, a pathetic person just told me to get off the phone. He thinks he runs the place."

I kinda did a Stephanie Tanner ("how rude") at this point, and was mildly shocked by the rudeness and self-centered nature of her response. I trieds to explain that this was the lab policy as i had seen it enforced and that I was not trying to be rude, but she did a non-verbal "talk to the hand" motion and hung up the phone.

Thankfully, not all NYU undergraduates are this spoiled and obnoxious - many of them are really great but it's the hipster ennui, the dissafected, post-gentriification sense of yuppie entitlement to urban space - which is certainly not unique to NYU students (although at Yale, there's much more of a technocrats of the future thing going on)- which i find so disconcerting.