You know who I'm talking about.  It may even be you.

The one who sits up in the front row and always has a comment about ev-er-y-thing.  He (or she) thinks that he is smarter, wittier, and has had more important/relevant life experiences than anyone else in the room.  He is under the impression that every syllable that comes out of his mouth is pure gold and will be of great benefit to all who are present, whether they be jokes, anecdotes, or tiny little bits of "wisdom" thrown in along the way.

Last semester it was Donnelly.  I didn't really think he was that annoying as much as just weird, though.  He made incredibly offbeat comments, like asking whether the professor played Sim City (which she had never heard of) because he thought it might be a lot like GIS (which it is not), and just standing there staring at the elevators for 10 minutes during break.  By the end of the semester, however, I had talked to him a few times and decided that he had an odd charm about him.  And just before Christmas, I ran into him at a restaurant where I was with Matt and his sister, and we had a nice little chat.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case, especially when the annoying "kid" is actually the annoying middle-aged person.  If you run into one of these in your classes, watch out.  The older student fancies himself to be a highly superior being to us young ones and therefore has much more knowledge to bestow than his adolescent to young adult counterparts.


I knew who this semester's subject would be pretty much from the minute I sat down in my AutoCAD class last Tuesday.  The guy had a comment for almost every statement the teacher made.  Most of these were something from his own life experience, like how he has kept printouts of various papers and still uses them after 15 years, when all the teacher was trying to say was 'we're trying to save paper, so don't print stuff out if you don't need to.'  At one point she just completely cut him off, saying "I'm going to run this part if that's ok."  Matt and I thought it was hilarious.  Oh yeah, Matt's in the class with me so we discuss what happened afterward at dinner.

Even all this would be in good fun if the guy didn't feel the need to "help out" whenever he felt like it.  We were signing up for a technology account on the computer so we could access some files more easily.  For some reason, Firefox was not taking my password so I had to switch over to Internet Explorer, which did take it, albeit verrry slowly.  While I was doing this, Mr. I Know Everything decided to scoot his seat over and see how I was doing.

"You just have to put in your campus account password," he says.
"Yeah, I know, I did that."
"Well, do it again."

Umm, yeah.  Got it.  Now go away.  Turns out he had done the exact same thing with Matt just before coming over to me.  A little later, I was behind because of the whole password deal, and whispered to Matt, "Hey, babe, which link do I click on?"  Before he could open his mouth, the knowitall was right there, explaining what all the links were.  Excuse me?  Did I address you?  I didn't care what all the links were.  I just wanted to know which one I was supposed to click on.  Gah.  Annoying.

This has calmed down a bit during our second week of class because he's actually working on the assignments now (shocker!) but the commentary still manages to come out at least several times during our 2 and 1/2 hour class period.

It's people like this that make me scared for the future.  Am I one day to join the ever growing ranks of the confidently clueless?  Who knows, but in the meantime, I will say this to the ones who are already there: Would you please pipe down?  I'm trying to learn and you're setting a bad example.