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Updated 105 Days ago
How to Strike Back When Mean Girls Turn into Mean Women
Ladies, we've all seen "Mean Girls," right? I'm referring to the 2004 movie that captures Lindsey Lohan and Rachel McAdams in head-to-head catty combat. Although the movie might have made a few exaggerations about the extent to which high school girls will backstab each other, it was right about one thing: girls can be malicious and despicable to each other, and it isn't always something that they grow out of.
What happens to these mean girls when they are thrown out into the real world? They turn into mean, bitter women.
You might be thinking that there's no way that mature adult women could or would be so shallow to one another, but you'd be wrong. It's more common than you think, you just might not know about it because it's going on behind your back.
The second you walk away from the break room, some conniving witch might make a hushed comment about how you look like you've been eating more at lunch lately. Or maybe your encounter with a she-devil is not so subtle at all. Maybe you're thinking about the snotty, well-coifed woman who not only had the nerve to cut you off in traffic this morning, but then had the nerve to flip you the bird while she was at it.
You have two options: you could take the high road and ignore the mean woman, or you could take La Lohan's approach to the situation and get even.
If you choose to take the high road (i.e. not stooping to the level of the Miss Priss that it majorly ticking you off, here are a few suggestions.
- Instead of replying with a catty comment of your own, be overly friendly and sugary sweet. If a woman tries to make a rude comment about your weight, smile as big as you can and respond with "Would you like me to share one of my eight twinkies with you? I keep a whole box in my purse." Chances are, your opponent won't know how to respond to that.
- If you find yourself the victim of office gossip in general, show those women what they sound like in an exaggerated fashion. "Ohhhhh. Myyyyyyy. Goshhhhh! Did you hear about Amy? She totally stole Beth's Post-It notes! And, like, Sarah looks so horrible today, what did she do? Roll out of bed and head straight to work? Ahhh! I just totally love gossiping about everyone, don't you?!" You'll probably annoy the office chatterboxes, but maybe they'll think twice before opening their mouth about you next time.
- Are you the victim of a woman who's hell on wheels? Don't do anything rash after they almost push you off the road. The number to report non-emergency incidents is (314) 231-1212. And you might feel a teensy bit happy when you see the state trooper ahead of you pull the crazy lady over.
- Ignore the (ahem) female dog. Sounds simple enough, but often, catty women continue to be catty when they see that they're getting a reaction out of you. Turn the other cheek and maybe they'll move onto their next victim.
Have any of you encountered mean girls of your own out there? How did you respond? (If your response was a punch in the face, that not qualify as a constructive suggestion.)
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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Actually- if people are talking about you behind your back, it's usually because hey are jealous of you in one way or another. So- if it happens to me, I just think that they must really have a self-esteem issue and their way of trying to improve it is to knock others (me) down to the level where they view themselves. It's sad really. It says more about the gossiper than the gossipee when you get right down to it.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.