Stop the tapping!

I'm sure you've all been in some sort of public computer lab in your lifetime, whether it has been a school computer lab, at a conference, or just a public library. Has anything ever distracted you? Were two girls sitting across the lab from you chatting about how their boyfriends are such jerks? Or how about the gum-chewer? Or the pencil tapper? Or the guy eating potato chips and all you hear is the crinkling of the potato chip bag? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about it. Well I would like to send out a quick request to all these habitual disruptive people. STOP!

The reason I feel I need to blog about this is because I recently witnessed this exact problem occur in a computer lab I was in the other day. Obviously I was in the computer lab to get work done. My schedule is very full, and I don't have a lot of time to mess around, so I was there to get business done. There were only four of us in the lab at this time. Two girls and two guys. I met up with one of my friends in the lab because we needed to get a pair project done. We sat down and started working on our project. About ten minutes into us working, we had to get up and move to the back row because there was a guy in the lab that was being so distracting that we had to move locations. I'm not sure what type of game he was playing on the computer, but it was the most annoying thing EVER! He happened to be sitting right behind us when we were sitting at our original location. I believe it was some sort of shooting game because all you could hear was the mouse going click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, about a million times an hour. And he would add in the keyboard every once in awhile, so we would hear click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, keyboard, keyboard, click, click, click, click, keyboard, click, click, click, and so on. Yeah, talk about annoying! I was getting so irritated with it that I thought if I imitated what he was doing, maybe he would get the hint to stop. Nope. He didn't. So we ended up moving to the back of the lab to finish our project. Luckily we didn't have much left on it, and didn't need to stay in the lab for longer.

So in conclusion, the bottom line of this post is to please be considerate of the people you are around. Please realize that most people are in a computer lab to get work done. If you want to play your little clicky games, or eat potato chips, or chit-chat with your friends, there are much better locations to do those things. I'm just sayin....

So how about you? Do you have any interesting stories about being in public computer labs? What are your viewpoints?