Just let me eat my lunch!

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who feel the need to express their opinion for no reason other than to insult someone's beliefs and/or posessions. Telling the bride that her wedding would've been better if she'd picked better colors for instance. Or telling someone who had just scratched together enough money to buy their first home that their neighborhood sucks. There's no point in doing these things. There is a time and place to speak your mind, and telling someone you think they made a bad choice when they are not soliciting your opinion and it is obvious that they disagree is just plain ignorant.


Today I'm in the lunchroom heating up my Lean Pocket for lunch. I'd been looking forward to it all day. Few things during a normal work day give me as much pleasure as a ham n' cheese Lean Pocket cooked in a microwave for two minutes and fifteen seconds. As I'm preparing said meal, a coworker looks over at me and says "Lean Pocket, eh?" I say "you betcha Lean Pocket, they're delicious!" He then proceeds to tell me some story about how he bought a huge box of them at Costco, hates them, and has been trying to get rid of them forever without throwing them away. "As soon as the last one's gone, I'm never buying another Lean Pocket again," he says.

Another coworker hears this, and goes into this story about how she heard a comedian do a bit on Lean Pockets. "It was hilarious," she says. "He kept talking about the horrible things they did to his digestive system! I was crying I was laughing so hard! I know I'll never eat a Lean Pocket."

I know that both of these individuals heard me talk about how much I enjoyed eating a Lean Pocket. They both knew I was heating one up as they ridiculed and insulted the very thing I intended to consume as soon as I could extract it from its handy little warming sleeve.

Sadly, I was born without the confrontation gene. Because I get angry so infrequently, I'm not very good at it. My anger tends to boil at the wrong times. I've been known to shrug off being dumped, passed over for a position I deserve and being taken advantage of, while getting irrationally irate at things like a remote control not working or someone ordering a pizza without the toppings I like. This usually leads to me being laughed at.

So I bit my tongue and let these inconsiderate people bash my meal. I'll have to settle for retribution in the form of the people who read this laughing at these anonymous offenders and hope that in the future people with more balls than I have will tell such people that they are inconsiderate, self involved pricks who can take their opinions and suck 'em.

ARGH!