So by all means let’s make all mothers bend over backwards to accommodate this? I’m sorry, if you can’t afford a $25 pair of headphones to help deal with your condition, the next logical step is “everyone else has to re-arrange their entire lives to suit me.”

Congratulations, you have successfully spotted the joke! They are a made-up solution to the made-up problem!

So you want to talk about something that’s not the topic of the article (mothers without consideration asking their kids to sit still for too long - when the actual mother in question brought a whole other person to take care of the kid, and positioned herself next to the exit for a quick getaway when, not if, the kid…

I must be stupid, because I was reading that as 18 hours one way, and it never occurred to me that it could be otherwise.

Considering your reading comprehension (talking through a movie isn’t comparable to a mother who is already standing next to a door ducking out with a baby, as was detailed in the story) I wouldn’t be surprised if you were exactly that kind of cretin. I suppose I should give you props for showing your ass so early -…

And yet, somehow, the world will keep spinning even if I miss a sentence or two while an apologetic mother rushes her baby out. Isn’t the resilience of life astonishing?

Where are you living that’s 18 hours to Paris by jet? Even if you’re coming from Mongolia, it’s only 12 hours, and I doubt very much that most people applying for the contest are coming from farther away than that.

True story, and the most irritating thing to ever happen to me: We’re playing Apples to Apples, the green (or category) card is “Things that glow.” I play “Marie Curie.” The person choosing the winner of the round couldn’t remember who Marie Curie was.

Talking about your experiences and having them talked about is not automatically aggrandizing, and agreeing with someone is not exactly showering them with laurel wreaths, either, but by all means if you want to misunderstand the way the internet and communication works to soothe the chip on your shoulder, go nuts.

Well, if I ever see anyone trying to hang a Superman cape on the woman’s shoulders, I’ll be sure to pass on your feelings on the matter.

My dinner with my friend also requires me to be able to hear my friend (and I paid for the experience, which seems to be the bar people set for when they’re allowed to clutch their pearls and huff), but as an adult I can usually manage to pull through and keep it together when I am momentarily interrupted by a…

And yet it still happens, even after asking people to silence their cell phones, that on a fairly regular basis someone will not do this and it will go off at an inconvenient time. It’s still not appropriate to lie on the ground tearing your hair out when this happens, which is only barely an exaggeration from how…

Just as long as you don’t tell my best friend (a Cynthia) that I regularly use her name as a stand-in to express “no one has time for your juvenile bullshit.”

Listen, if you’re on a plane and you don’t pop an Ambien and get drunk on tiny bottles of gin as soon as the drinks cart comes around, then you’re responsible for whatever aggravation you’re still awake to notice, not the crying kid.

If you really can’t handle a distraction for the 20-40 seconds it would take for the mother in the story to get her baby out the door she had helpfully positioned herself right next to, then maybe the average professional environment is not for you? Or perhaps you need to carry around noise-cancelling headphones.

How many people have liked or reblogged the pictures of Licia Ronzulli who are now here in the comments complaining about having to put up with other people’s kids fussing for like 20 seconds before being removed from the room?

All cars are white underneath. Most cars made to export, especially to non-Western, non-first-world places, are white specifically because they don’t need to get a second coat of paint.

I agree. Nobody is less charmed by children than me, but I am even less charmed (negative charmed!) by those people who pretend it’s a reasonable worldview to insist that children should be kept in their homes and away from polite society until they’re 17 and 4 months.

I Wonder then if my total lack of a parenting instinct can be blamed on my late puberty (I didn't hit it until 14 and a bit) and if ill suddenly start wanting babies 4-5 years after everyone else.

I legitimately just thought that was something those two girls I saw do this in middle school did, and I assumed they grew out of it. I can’t imagine that there’s more than 2 people, presumably older than 14, who do this ever.