Hey People Behind Me, Shut the Fuck Up!
Graphic by Téa Sklar
Dear People Behind Me,
You probably don’t know me. To you, I’m just the head of hair that sometimes blocks your view in lecture. But, believe it or not, that head of hair has feelings and, right now, a lot of those feelings are negative. Do you have a guess as to why I’m feeling so shitty? I’ll give you a second to think. If you guessed the absurd amount of noise that you feel the need to make every single second of a lecture, you’d be correct!
Look, I get it, not everyone is in college for an education and not every class is important. But when I’m sitting in a 300 level engineering class that’s required for my major, I kind of want to be able to hear what the professor’s saying. I know - what a bummer. Boo! What kind of a nerd actually pays attention in class and wants to do well? Me. I do. So please consider other people for a change and give my Ritalin a fighting chance.
Unfortunately at this school, there’s a wide-spread epidemic of people being unable to take their conversations out of the classroom. Everyone acts like we don’t all live within a 20 minute radius of each other and can hang out whenever we want. But no, it’s super important that you tell your friend in the middle of an almost silent lecture hall about what you’re planning on cooking tonight for dinner or how your love life is going as of late. I mean, if you waited the 80 minutes it takes for this class to be over, you might forget what you were going to say and have to text it to them later. What a nightmare!
And to all the people that whisper to their friends behind them for whatever reason, this is not about you. At least when you’re whispering, you’re aware that other people around you might want to pay attention to class and aren’t talking so loudly that the professor can’t remember what they’ve been lecturing about for the past 20 minutes. Seriously, why can I clearly hear your conversation when you are 10 rows behind me?
But you monsters don’t stop at just talking. No, that wouldn’t be enough for you. You also have to grab the crunchiest snack that you can find and munch on it so loudly that it sounds like you’re chewing directly into my ear. And after you’ve licked your snack off of your fingers, you decide to play a game on your computer and type so loudly and quickly that if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you’re a hacker about to say “I’m in”.
So, to all the chronic lecture chit chatters, I have one single request from you: remember that you’re not the only person in the world. Other people have ears and would like to pay attention to what’s actually going on in class rather than who you saw at a party on Saturday. And if that isn’t enough motivation, keep in mind that when you open your mouth, everyone in that lecture hall now knows way more about you than they ever wanted to.
Your biggest hater,
Lee Bruton