Mean Girls - the equestrian remake
Like a lot of little girls, I wanted a pony. (Still do actually - does anybody want to buy me a pony? Pleeease?) But my parents were poor so instead I settled for working at my local stable in return for lessons. Sounds crap, but actually I love being around horses and enjoyed the work as much as the riding. The place at which this happened was a rather Thelwell-esque stables on the London/Hertfordshire border. Anyone who has ever set foot in the place will recognise it from the following description and I will be most amused if any b3tans have ever been there...

Basically, it was a good sort of place, the horses were well looked after, but there was just one problem: the woman who ran it. She wasn't actually a nasty piece of work at all, but she had serious, SERIOUS anger management problems. Case in point: when I turned up on my first day as a "helper", she told me to grab a fork and start shovelling shit. I asked her where she kept the forks and she spun round, brandishing hers in a slightly menacing manner, and barked, "Well, you'll just have to find out then, won't you!!!" Jeez, it would have taken so much less effort to have told me where the bloody fork was in the first place... The woman could scream and shout for England, and would do so if you displayed any weakness or incompetence whatsoever, which when a stable is being run largely by 11-14-year-olds with very little experience happens quite a lot. And the horses would sense how nervous you were and play you up something wicked, because that's what horses do if you're nervous, and then she'd yell at you some more. So, she was difficult to deal with, and if you got the slightest thing wrong it would be like you'd just unleashed armageddon. What I'm trying to say is, I'm 25 now and to this date she is still the most terrifying person I've ever met - and I've lived above a sex shop in Kings Cross since then.

So anyway, I'd been there a couple of years and had just about earned her respect. I should say now that I was a very, VERY geeky, unpopular, awkward, skinny, frizzy-haired thirteen-year-old. So when I was informed that I was in charge of two new recruits, who I observed were wearing pristine white jodhpurs and designer sweatshirts; sporting that slouchy, hands-on-hips, scowling look beloved of evil bitchy popular girls the world over; and who appeared to be a good year older than me, my heart sank. Actually no, it didn't - it jumped up into my throat and tried to commit suicide. I was IN CHARGE of these girls?

Yes I was in charge of them, and guess what, they took an instant dislike to me. I tried to break the ice by making a jokey comment about white jodhpurs not being the best thing to wear for mucking out stables. BIG MISTAKE - never criticise a bitchy girl's dress sense, even in a jovial manner! Unfortunately I didn't know this at that age - I was trying to appeal to their human side without realising that girls like that don't have one. Their senses of humour are removed at birth. They have seek-and-destroy radar for geeks. They have software implanted in their brains that enables them, despite their limited intellectual capacities, to come up with the perfect bitchy comment at the perfect moment. And their farts smell of Chanel No 5.

They refused to do any work and just stood watching me shovel shit in front of them, slouching with their hands on their hips, making "Ewww" faces at each other. After a while they disappeared. Good riddance, I thought. But no - a few minutes later, I went into the tack room and caught them in there putting on make up. I'm not kidding. I stared incredulously at them, and they did that bitch-girl scoffing noise at me, turned away as if I was lower than the horse shit I was picking up and continued applying lip gloss.

It was turning out to be just about the worst day ever, but I made the fatal error of thinking that it couldn't get worse. Later that day we were out in the field when one of the other girls asked me to come back to the yard to help her with a difficult pony who I was good with. I bade my charming recruits farewell and reminded them to shut the gate on their way out.

Oh yes, I reminded them to shut the gate.

So I really shouldn't have been that surprised, in retrospect, when half an hour later everybody had had to drop everything to round up the seven overexcited ponies who were on the loose. I had never, ever seen my boss angrier. I honestly expected her to come at me with a hunting crop. And as she turned purple from yelling at me, the two evil harpies were standing behind her, sniggering. I tried to tell her that it had been them and not me, but it just made her even madder - these poor new girls who didn't know what they were doing were my responsibility! It was entirely my fault that these perfect angels had left the gate open. Of course it was, how silly of me.

I expect that they are probably alcoholic housewives by now.

Length? Have you ever seen the size of a horse's cock?
(grandmasterfluffles Come to my Armageddon party on, Sat 26 Jan 2008, 0:05, 5 replies)

No Joke
I don't have a clever or sarcastic comment.

Just, you poor, poor kid. That was a lot of abuse you didn't deserve.
(MrCanoehead Marzipaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!, Sat 26 Jan 2008, 13:33, closed)

"Sporting that slouchy, hands-on-hips, scowling look beloved of evil bitchy popular girls the world over"
Being one of the geeks for the majority of my school years as well (albeit a male one) I'm all too familiar with this stance; it's generally set free should you dare to even look at one of the foul little beasts.

I even got scoffed at once after I stopped one of the orange-tinted, peroxide-headed morons from getting run over by a truck; apparently saving her life by grabbing around her waist and pushing her out of it's path constituted me being a pervert. Did I also mention that she was supposedly rather drunk, having spent the majority of the school day supping vodka out of a water bottle? Didn't get so much as a fucking "thank you", either.

Have a click for being a fellow bit of bully fodder.

On a side note, should I feel bad for saving this girl's life? Chances are she will spend the rest of her days excreting children and eating benefits.
(hypnoticme is an anarcho-syndicalist commune, Sat 26 Jan 2008, 15:19, closed)

MrCanoehead
Good stuff happened there too! But yes, that was a spectacularly shit day.

And hypnoticme - I am so glad that there are men out there who see these evil bitches for what they are...I have noticed an extremely annoying trend that girls like this are always uber-popular with a lot of men, who ignore nice girls in favour of scowling fashionistas. Do these guys all have some sort of masochistic wish to be assaulted with a GHD hair straightener???
(grandmasterfluffles Come to my Armageddon party on, Sun 27 Jan 2008, 0:15, closed)

Fuck...
Unfortunately, the world is chock full of 'people' like this. Equally unfortunately, most of them seem to get through life totally unscathed.

Bastards, the lot of 'em.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Sun 27 Jan 2008, 20:50, closed)

I've always hated "popular" girls
Give me someone with brains any day. And have a click from another one who saw through their bitchy veneer.
( jim_bob can herd cats., Mon 28 Jan 2008, 22:15, closed)