Awkward

Is it weird that I had to Google the word awkward to make sure I was spelling it correctly for this title? BTW, I spelled it wrong. It is just one of those words that looks wrong when you write it out. Anyways, not what I was going to talk about.

Today I went and met my best friend for breakfast at IHOP. It was 10 a.m. but this IHOP is always busy even on a random Thursday mid-morning. We got seated at a table with a booth on one side of us and a wall on the other. As we are chatting I notice that the older (like my parent's age, not old) couple in the booth next to us were being super quiet while eating.

Now I've been married awhile and I understand that it isn't abnormal to not talk a lot with your spouse while eating a meal since you live together and don't always have a lot to catch up on like my friend and I did. But what I noticed as we chatted is that it appeared they were listening to our conversation. Like the entire 45 minutes we were eating there. It wasn't even all that subtle like they were just overhearing an occasional comment.

We didn't discuss anything all that juicy but we did have a few things that we discussed that I didn't really appreciate someone listening to. So I ended up just steering the conversation to topics like my new yard service I hired this week and baby sleeping patterns, etc.

I understand that you really have no expectation of privacy out in public when it comes to conversations but I do find it annoying when people make it very obvious they are openly listening to your conversation. Seriously. Can't they at least chat amongst themselves about the weather or something? I catch myself occasionally listening in on part of a conversation if something catches my attention or I am in particularly close quarters with someone like a person on their cell phone in an elevator but this wasn't like that. The restaurant was busy enough to generate background noise and they obviously had each other to talk to.

What was even weirder is that when we left they were parked next to me and the guy actually waved at me as he was getting in his truck. Weird.