I have a big mouth, and I can be
rather opinionated, more often than not, speaking without thinking. Of course,
when that happens, its total crap and I end up retracting what I say, but there
has been the odd occasion that such things have left me in somewhat awkward
situations. A case point is saying how much I hate the name Patricia, when the
friend that I’m telling this too tells me his Mum is called Patricia… Oops! But
there is one occasion that tops that.
I went on an Identification of
Bats course as part of my degree, it was a field course and I spent a long
weekend in the middle of Shropshire learning about bats. The person leading the
course was a tad odd, she kept dead bats in old margarine tubs, she dried out
the bodies in her airing cupboard and we had a un-holy amount of tea breaks. It
was the last night and we were out on another bat walk at stupid o’clock at
night. By this point I had had my fair share of bats. Once the bat walk was
done, she said that she would see us at about 3 in the morning at the same spot
to see the bats coming in to roost. Now, in the itinerary that we were given,
it said that this final bat walk would be optional, something that she didn’t
dispute. We went to bed, but of course, I couldn’t sleep.
The alarm went off in the room
and I got up and dressed. It was cold outside, I wasn’t feeling well, and I had
less than an hour of sleep. Fair to say that I wasn’t in the best of moods to
stand in the pouring rain counting bats. I tried to get her attention to ask if
I could leave, but she was too into counting non-existent bats. She’ll never
notice if I nip back to bed I thought to myself, and away I went.
The next morning, I got up, well rested and
ready for the day, went down to breakfast where a heated conversation was going
on. I was right, she didn’t notice that one person had left, but she sure as
hell noticed when about 15 people left and she was practically stood on her
own. I had unintentionally started the mass migration of the group back to bed!
The people that had stayed out told us that she had noticed that most of the
class had disappeared and she would be docking marks from the people that had
left (Not that it mattered, I made up any of the docked marks with a 71% on the
essay afterwards). Everyone that had left was angry; the itinerary did say that
it was optional. Anyway as we went back upstairs after breakfast, I had a
conversation with my two friends, pointing out that she hadn’t even been
looking at the right roost, that she was being unreasonable, that she shouldn’t
have put optional on the itinerary if it wasn’t. I went on, and on about it,
getting it all off my chest.
When we got into the room, my two
friends were absolutely wetting themselves and I couldn’t understand why. When
they eventually gained their composure, they told me that she was behind me the
whole time, and she heard everything. Well, the class was a tad awkward after
that. Glad that my friends had a laugh, because I was mortified. I laugh about
it now though, you have to!
No comments:
Post a Comment