If I ever see this woman at a another conference....

I would love to get my hands on that hair.

...I am leaving.

Cookie was at a huge conference this past week, and everywhere I went, this was the person I had to deal with.  The problem was that she was rude, loud, obnoxious, dismissive, passive-aggressive, negative, and uncouth.

She thought she was "all that".

But she wasn't.

She was the worst of human beings.

Take this picture.  It was not our first encounter.  I got to my session room for the ed session I selected for that hour and sat down on the seat in the back of the room, last row.  There was probably another fifty behind me to the ballroom doors.  I sat there for five minutes before Miss Charming showed up.  She stops, looks at me and says "Great, I was going to sit in that seat because I am only staying for twenty minutes, and you are there taking up two spaces."

In truth, I was taking up two spaces.

My backpack was on the seat next to me.  Why was I taking up two spaces, well, the backpack has a tendency to fall over, and the rest of the room, with chairs for 400 people, only had about 50 in it.  There were rows of empty seats.

Cookie was dumbstruck.  There were 350 seats in that room that were empty, but I had to go an upset her applecart by taking those two seats that didn't have her name on them.  Silly me.

As I said, this was not my first encounter with this Hellkite.  So I just looked at her and just smiled.  She was expecting something to create drama over and from me she just got crickets.   Drove her insane, so she sat in front of me.

The day after this encounter, she plopped herself down at a luncheon table I was seated at.  I was guest and had been given the seat by a Board member who was courting my future participation.  No sooner than she shoved a roll in her pie hole, my host returned to the table and said: "Muriel, this table is for Board members and guests."  Muriel picked up the salt and loaded up her salad and said "well they can sit someplace else."

That afternoon was my last at the conference and the next two sessions, there was Muriel.

In one session, the speaker instructed Muriel to put her phone down and not take pictures of the slides.  In another - technical writing - Muriel argued with the speaker that footnotes and citations were the same things.  They are not.

When I was checking out the hotel, there is Muriel again.  This time she looked at me and said "Oh, leaving so soon," in a voice dripping with passive-aggressiveness.

I smiled and walked by to waiting car.  I was not charmed by Muriel, and I wasn't going to engage her.

Look, I understand that it takes all kinds, but the woman was vile.  From my first interaction to my last.  My friend Katy said that Muriel was top of her game in her career. 

"Is she a Leona Helmsley impersonator?  Keeper of the Hellhounds for Gozor?"

I told the husband that if I ever encounter her again, all bets are off, I am leaving.

A little Muriel goes a long, long way.