Mwergh.

You know how I said that occasionally I have been known to flirt a little bit in order to get something from something from someone?  Well the opposite works too.  I don't quite mean flirtation, I just mean I can have pretty good customer service sometimes.

On Saturday I volunteered at a TED event.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design.  It's basically a conference full of speakers who are pretty good who talk about "ideas worth spreading."  I hear about TED talks all the time at schoolio.  People think they're really cool.  At some events tickets are $6,000, but at the one I worked at they were only about $200.

Anywho, the TED event was pretty good for me because I am good at smiling and answering questions.  Everyone was really easy to work with and it was great.
Mostly.

It bugs me when people think they are entitled to things.  Or think that they are more important than other people.  Ok, story time.

Because I worked at the event, I got to hear all of the speakers (until I decided I was exhausted and just ditched the whole thing three hours 4 hours before it ended - but in my defense I had already been there for 7 hours with only a 15 minute break for lunch).  But they were really cool talks so I had been taking little notes on my program.

After lunch, when the next session was starting, a few people had lost their programs and asked if they could have mine.  I told them where they could find more and people were generally ok with that.  One lady just wouldn't take no as an answer.  She asked for mine and I told her where she could find others and she still just wanted mine.  So I told her I had taken notes in it and she just said thanks and stuck out her hand.

WHAT THE HECK??  Just because I was wearing a red staff shirt and she had paid money for her ticket does not mean that she can take anything she wants from me.  What's next, does she want the jewelry I was wearing?

I don't know why this bugged me so much, but it really did.  Am I crazy?  I know it was my job for the day to help people, but I wasn't about to carry them to their seats or anything.  I'm probably overreacting, but it really got under my skin.  It made me not want to help people for the rest of the day.

I ended up giving her my program.  But I also flashed her a look that was both a smile and a dirty look at the same time.  I don't think I've ever really done that before and meant it.

And then, just so that there's a picture in this post:

A (crappy) picture of a dancer from Stanford's PowWow a couple of weekends ago.  

Getting in touch with my roots, yo.