Bitter, party of 1, your table is ready.

Kids, pull up a chair—I've got the mother of all rants singing in my soul and I've got to let 'er out.

I had the unavoidable pleasure of presenting my project to the company’s European marketing team this week. This group has a new VP, whom we'll call Jason, and who's based in the UK. Apparently Jason was looking for an opportunity to take it out and whip it all around to impress his new subordinates. And unbeknownst to me I was served up as the whipping girl du jour.

Firstly, I should point out that to accommodate my colleagues in Europe, I had to get up at the UNGODLY hour of 5am, chug some java, and get on the road in the DARK in order to get to the conference room on time. Man alive, I am so NOT a morning person. Archie and Vlad know not to talk to me or really even to look at me until I've been upright with coffee cup in hand for at least 60 minutes. Imagine then my state of mind going into this meeting.

These days we in the tech world conduct inter-continental meetings remotely, so my boss and I sat together in the large, empty conference room, hovered around an alien-shaped speaker phone. Really this thing looked like it could crawl off the table and install itself in my brain stem. In retrospect, I wish it had.

Slowly, the team in points East of Eden assembled and promptly muted their phones, so that I was literally and figuratively presenting to an empty room. Luckily my uber-micromanager boss kept leaning across me to adjust the contrast on my laptop screen and muting the phone as I was speaking to give me pointers on what I should say next. Can you say not-giving-me-that-confident-feeling?

And finally the crescendo of our morning-time meeting: Jason said that the campaign creative looked like "the back of a software box" and had nothing of interest in it at all. Kids, I appreciate a smartass simile as much as the next gal, but not when it's directed at me. Yes, I can dish it out and no, I can't take it. He went on but I won’t bore you or embarrass myself with the details of what he said.

I waited a few minutes and thought about telling him that his accent reminded me of back episodes of "Dr. Who" from the 70s and asking him what his personal relationship with deodorant was. I briefly considered telling him that his was the empire that crumbled and lost what turned out to be the largest world economy in history. I even thought about telling him that I hated the Beatles and rejected every contribution to pop culture that has ever come out of the British Isles.

Instead I thanked his team for their support and told him it had been a pleasure working with them. In the end, that felt better—Brits get sarcasm, don't they?