I don’t why this stuff never happens to me. I hear so many stories of people being blatantly rude and inappropriate like this, and all I can think is “Man, I wish this would happen to me so I could come back, demand the kid get off the computer I was away from for a brief moment and verbally reprimand the mother for her behavior.”
Maybe I wouldn’t do that, I don’t know, because I never get these opportunities. Not once in my life has something of this type of rudeness, where I can directly confront the person, really happened. I’ve had people be rude to me, but it’s always in some situation where I don’t have a chance/cannot confront the situation.
But I’m pretty sure if I came back to find out that someone had taken my computer I’d tell the mother she needs to move her child immediately, I’m not entirely sure what I’d do if she refused. But probably something along the lines of just sitting down next to her, grabbing her keyboard, and basically commandeering the computer she’s working on. Or if I felt like that wasn’t going to work and wanted to be petty I’d just turn the power off on her computer and her kids computers then leave.
Not lame at all. One time I was waiting in a line to get into the computer lab in my dorm. There were about ten computers, all in use, and these two bitches were sitting right next to each other and chatting (this was over 10 years ago, when chatting was new, in fact, it wasn’t really chatting, but I can’t remember what it was called at the time.) One would type out a message, and then lean over and watch the message pop up on the other’s screen, giggle, then repeat. This went on for about 10 minutes and there were four of us waiting for a computer to open up. We started off with a loud conversation about the important work we had to do, paper due the next day, etc… When this had no effect one of the other people waiting went berzerk on these two bitches, which, although it just brought on more giggling, did get them off the computers.