In Continuum.

Courtesy of Elizabeth's brilliant hands and mind.

I can't believe I am dedicating another blog entry to Rosemary, or Stinkweed, according to April. Rosemary is a pompous witch, and I know some of you out there are gasping right now because of how direct that last sentence sounded. I used to censor her name and protect her identity, but not anymore. I do not think that a pompous witch, like herself, deserves any form of censorship when it comes to blog entries depicting her stupidity. She has become quite running joke between us ever since the semester started, as the whole cohort of BAC students are now being exposed to her teaching skills, or lack thereof. The truth is, it is OK if you are a genius but you haven't got the talent to teach. But it is another story altogether when you can't teach, and talk about mascara and potato chips in class instead of anything else from the textbook. 

It has gotten worse this semester, simply because she has given herself more time to talk as compared to the last. Last semester, she did nothing but to sit at the back of the class to observe most of the time, which also meant that she didn't have to have a lot of talking opportunities. That turned out to be a blessing for the most of us, because this pompous witch is better with her mouth stapled up than opened. This semester, she has carried her habit of not teaching anything substantial over, and she talks about the most irrelevant things in classes every week, the same classes we have paid a truckload of money for. Like I said before, it is completely fine if you are going to be a lecturer like Raja, who comes to class unprepared and cannot do simple math, a lecture who realizes her glaring mistake in calculation about an hour after she has written the answer on the board. It is OK to be someone like that, but you don't have to come to class to educate us about the American politics, or whether or not Indonesian chocolates taste worse than ordinary chocolates. You don't have to take half an hour on attendance alone, and you certainly don't have to come to school wearing tight t-shirts that make yourself look even more obscene than you already are.

Just last week, the rest of the BAC batch who never experienced Rosemary, was exposed to her for the very first time. Instead of teaching anything on the topic of Organizational Communication, the main idea behind the module we are taking, she took half an hour on taking attendance alone. She has the uncanny ability to drift off to a completely different topic when doing the simplest things, like taking attendance. When she came to Antoinette's name, she started going on and on about a friend of hers called Annette living in Arizona(Thus, the other person in the picture drew by the brilliant Elizabeth). After about ten minutes talking about this friend of hers, she carried on with the attendance taking, only to stop once again to talk about the American politics, which has nothing to do with Organizational Communication whatsoever. Sure, the election is an issue that concerns all of us, but we surely did not pay money to hear what you have to say about how much you hate Clinton and how much you love Obama. So that speech about how the Clintons are playing dirty politics went on for about fifteen minutes, which is ridiculous because there isn't such a thing as "clean" politics. It is amazing how she has the ability to weave the grandest tale out of the littlest things in her class, and how much she can talk about other than the content of the textbooks.

Rosemary has a problem, a problem of understanding who she is and where she came from. She speaks as if she is an American, just because she has an American Express card and visits the country frequently.  You see, she spent a lot of time in Hawaii studying, an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Sandwiched between the continents of North America and Asia, she must have gotten more than a little confused about her ethnicity. More than that, she forgets about her own existence sometimes and blabbers on and on about other people's mistakes and flaws when she really is describing herself. An example would be when she was showing a twelve minute video of a bunch of people arguing about the American election, and her comment after the video was how much the Americans like to talk. "They talk and talk and talk, nonstop!" she said, in an accent even less pleasing than metal music to my ears. It was a freaking talk show, and people tend to talk a lot on talk shows! If she wasn't happy with the fact that people talked so much, she could have turned the video off and rid us of those time wasted watching it. Besides, the only person who really talked and talked without any reason and substance was herself. 

As if her mindless blabbering wasn't enough, she conveniently went on to talk about mascara, Jack and Jill potato chips, Indonesia chocolates - which supposedly taste bad, and Taiwanese politicians who like to fight their opinions out. Of course, she forgot the presence of an Indonesian in the audience - Kania, a Taiwanese - myself, and Chelsea when she was talking about how ignorant Americans are. She praises the Americans, then she puts them down in the next sentence in the blink of an eye. Like I said, having lived in Hawaii for too long, she clearly has conflicting ideas about people from either side of the Pacific. Rosemary is like the narrator from Fight Club, both of them like to slap themselves in their faces. The narrator does it literally, while Rosemary slaps herself in the face without realizing it most of the time. She cannot hold an argument against herself very well, and usually end up being the laughing stalk of the class - once again, without realizing it either. Having a "Dr." tagged to her name, she thinks that she is one pedestal above everybody else in terms of everything. The truth is, the only thing she is one up from everybody else is the ability to slap herself silly. 

Today, her pompousness reached a new high, an epitome of all pompousness around the world. She was speaking of customer services, and comparing the services they provide in Singapore as to America - once again, as you might have already observed, has nothing to do with Organizational Communication. She started by talking about her experiences in Singapore, how the attendants at various shops in Singapore would check for the littlest of defects in the refunded items before credits are being returned in compensation. "Such things do not happen in America!" she would proclaim, and then she went on to talk about her experiences there. She once returned a wallet to the shop she bought it from, a bag for her laptop after using it for an entire trip in Hawaii, and a pair of shoes she wore for two weeks. All of those, because she discovered that she didn't actually like the things she bought after buying them. 

Now, seriously. Who the hell returns items just because they found out that they don't like it after purchase? That aside, who is stupid enough to buy something they are not sure whether or not they'd like in the very first place? Only Rosemary is capable of such utter stupidity, only she has the cheeks to return a pair of shoes after wearing them for a week because she found out that she didn't like them, what kind of mentality is that? So should we start returning our underwear because they are too tight for our balls, or return our sanitary pads because they are not absorbent enough? Seriously, Rosemary should understand that when you are going to spend your hard earned money(Though she really doesn't deserve a single cent), spend it wisely. Don't throw your money away on something which you are unsure of, and then come back to refund it altogether. That's not being a smart customer, that's being retarded. It works in America because they are nice, but don't come and complain about how bad the  customer servicing in Singapore is when they do not accept your two weeks old shoes. Oh, it gets better. It gets a whole lot better.

She started talking about how a cleaner at the school canteen accidentally spilled food over her right before a lecture, and she demanded to see the manager after the cleaner failed to apologize on the spot. So the manager came and offered a wet cloth, she was unsatisfied about that, and neither was she happy with the compensation of a meal. The manager even offered to drive her all the way back home to get herself changed out of the dirtied clothes, and cab fare for her to travel back home and to school all over again - all of those offers were refused by Rosemary, as she stood there with a smirk on her face, waiting for what other tricks the manager would come up with to compensate her abyss of needs. She was obviously being a bitch and a pain in the ass, but she argued against that claim even though nobody brought it up - well, not literally anyway. You could have smelled the disgusts we had for her in lecture today.