Our reporter did some undercover research during yesterday’s Prytania and Plenaries. While secretly looking around, I found four things that many participants do while being under the falsely optimistic expression that nobody notices.
1. Sleeping
The most obvious one which we – at one point or another – all have done: taking naps during sessions. Some are more openly doing this by actually laying down on the floor in the back of the plenary hall, others just accidently fall asleep and wake up when the speaker raises his or her voice. You can recognize the latter group by a guilty look on their face, shifting around on their chair to prevent it from happening again, or desperately clinging on to a disgusting cup of machine coffee with too much sugar.
2. Picking your nose
Just one thing to say about this, no matter how subtle you think you are doing this: we actually see it!
3. Stickering
Always a fun activity: secretly placing stickers on the backs of the people in front of you. Your mission has succeeded if they actually walk around all day with another sticker of a Local on their back. Obviously, the more people you sticker, the better. Let the games begin!
4. Drinking
Here we have two groups again. First of all we have the “I have nothing to hide” group that casually drinks a half liter can of beer on the back rows. Secondly there is the “I am totally innocent” group that pours some whiskey in their coffee to get through heavy hangover mornings. You can recognize the latter by the intensely happy faces they have after finishing their coffee (and as we all know, that is not due to the great machine coffee taste).
Last word of advice: next time when you do one of these things, firstly check if The AEGEEan team is close by, you might actually end up with a picture in the magazine…
Written by Maartje Natrop, AEGEE-Utrecht