Never take pity on people
There was this girl at my school who everybody hated. (No, not me, thank you). She'd never been in any of my classes before Year 10 so I didn't know her - I just knew everybody hated her. She was ugly and geeky with an embarrassing name (her surname was a synonym for toilet...hehehe...) and I assumed that was all that was wrong with her.

So when it came to our first science class in Year 10 and she walked into the room, there was a collective groan. Other students yelled abuse at her every time she made a tentative motion towards sitting next to them. It was horrible to watch. There was an empty seat next to me, so I did what any decent person would have done and beckoned her over to sit next to me.

She quickly revealed herself to be annoying as hell, and whilst the volume of abuse she received from my fellow students was highly disproportionate to the suffering she bestowed upon them, I was starting to understand why she was so unpopular. She was just...SO annoying! And she smelled.

Of course, since I was the first person at school who'd ever been nice to her, I was adopted as her best friend. It was like that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa sends a valentine to Ralph Wiggum out of pity and then he drives her nuts.

The worst thing she ever did was this: There was a boy in my youth orchestra I had a huge crush on and I unwisely showed her a photo of him during a particularly boring science lesson. When she then saw him in town a couple of weeks later, she actually went up to him and told him I'd said we were going out.

"Oh, sorry, I thought he was your boyfriend!"

Well, he never will be now, thank you very much!

I bumped into her a while ago. She was at LSE (good for her) and insisted on swapping numbers with me. As soon as she left, I changed her name in my address book to DO NOT ANSWER.
(grandmasterfluffles Come to my Armageddon party on, Wed 2 Aug 2006, 14:46, Reply)