When we’re playing musical cars so that we can keep the parking space in front of our house (yes, I know we’re not entitled, so we just don’t leave it empty) and I have to back up a couple of houses’ worth in our narrow 1-way street, every time someone turns the corner and starts to come down the street at the same time. Of course they have the right to drive down the street, but we don’t have that much traffic and it seems to happen a lot at the wrong time (what do they call that, confirmation bias?). No seething, just resigned annoyance.
It’s difficult to get rid of them completely. But it seems to me there’s a strong case for introducing regulations about the amount of noise they make, and the degree of annoying whine. I think with a little impetus to do some R&D they could be made significantly quieter for a small cost increase. But manufacturers have no inctentive to make them quieter without regulation, because people will just buy the louder one that costs 10% less.
I loathe leaf blowers. A huge space I might understand, but a typical city yard? Make them get rakes, I say! (It would be great employment for marginal people who struggle to find work, I should think.)
Or, at least, make the noisy gas ones illegal and make them switch to electric. Nowhere near the noise, plus it doesn’t send clouds several feet into the air, only lifting material a foot or two, from what I’ve seen.
What truly irritates me about them though Is they always seem to spend an extra twenty minutes being very anal and chasing two last leaves off the lawn or drive. Especially since the homeowner is at work, and by the time they return, more leaves will have fallen.
That and because any porch furniture for a block is now utterly dust coated, especially when there a couple of houses on the block using such services. Grrr!
I hate when approaching a 4-way stop and there is already one car there from the left or right sitting at the stop. I’m still approaching but they’re not moving because it’s some Nervous Nellie who thinks I’m going to blow the stop sign. They wait till I get there and make a complete stop before they go. So now instead of them being across the intersection by the time I stop so I can approach-stop-go, I now have to approach-stop-wait for them to cross-go.
My phone rings, I recognize the caller so I answer it. Then the first thing they say is “what are you doing?”
Preparing to summit Everest?
Breathlessly waiting for your call?
Taking a crap?
Sitting around watching traffic?
MYOB!
I’ve seen the same thing, with pedestrians at an intersection with a two- or four-way stop or even one with no stop sign but a well-marked crosswalk. They’re standing there, waiting for me to approach and come to a complete stop before making their way across the street. However, had they just walked across, they would have cleared the intersection before I even got there.
The way some people drive, I don’t exactly blame them (although it is irritating). It only takes one inattentive or distracted driver to kill you in a crosswalk.
I am currently living in a cheap house share (ever tried moving to a county you’ve never visited during a national lockdown? Turns out there’s not many options). It’s so cheap that there’s no communal area other than the kitchen, which the landlord has stuck some couches in to attempt to create the illusion of a social atmosphere.
One of the other tenants sits on these couches. Not just when he’s waiting for food to finish cooking, but when he’s bored and wants to talk to someone. He talks to me when I come in to use the kitchen.
The parking situation at work bugs me. I share a side of a building with one other company, there’s about 7 people who work there, I’m a 1 person shop. There is plenty of parking, evenly distributed along the lot, but they insist on parking in front of my door, not in front of theirs.
The bane of my existence, they are. The worst offenders are the “landscapers” ( read: mow, blow, and go ) that more and more neighbors here seem to be hiring instead of mowing their own quarter acre lawns.
Yeah. The worst ones are those backpack style gas blowers the aforementioned “landscapers” use. Much much louder than even the smaller gas ones. The sound really carries as does the dust/debris fallout. A perfect example of how externalities negatively affect the lives of others in the vicinity due to someone’s actions.
I hear you ( with whatever hearing I’ve got left after being rendered deaf by said blowers ). I’ve seen that same behavior and it’s ridiculous. Actually I think it’s even worse with grass clippings than it is with leaves: at least the leaves are collected, picked up, and bagged ( most times ). What I see is some lunkhead with a backback blower tag-teaming with his fellow lunkhead on the big noisy commercial grade mower blasting the clippings and such in its wake. Mower guy is done in 15-20 minutes, but blower guy spends 30 minutes as he blows clippings not to amass and collect, but to more or less spread them all over in an attempt to disperse and hide them. I think he must get a dollar bonus for every time he blips the throttle as he blasts away at small clumps of debris. Even inside my house, I can still hear that droning whine/din of the fucking thing even with earplugs in. Outside, the noxious cloud of dust makes its way over properties 2 and three houses down.
I can’t wait for winter and the cessation of lawn mowing season.
My mom starts every conversation with "So where are you NOW?"
(Often pronounced 'Neeyowwww". And peevishly, as it’s usually followed with "Remember Tuesday, when I called and you weren’t home? What were you so busy with then?")
I want a special award when she’s gone (maybe a tasteful trophy presented at her funeral) for never snapping “WHY is it any of your business?”
Apparently your mother is my sister.
That “gentle tap on the horn.” I assume some people think it’s nice or something? I hate it. It makes me so angry I can barely speak. I want horrible things to happen to the driver and parents and children. I want the nine plagues visited in their car all at once. Also, I’m more likely to slow the fuck down when someone does that than to speed up. Partially because the distraction they’re causing and the rage I’m feeling mean that I really do need to drive slower to make sure I’m aware enough of my surroundings. Partially out of revenge.
Do you feel the same way when you’re asleep at the signal? What else can someone do?
I’d never beep at someone to get them to drive faster. I’d just find a way to get around them. Unless they’re driving 35 mph in the fastlane on the freeway. There’s a Farside for that one!
Find a pair of giant, cheap headphones at a thrift shop. Wear them into the kitchen. Other tenant starts yammering? Just smile wordlessly, tap the headphones, and continue about your business.
Bonus points if the audio cord is conspicuously dangling in view, not connected to a damn thing.
(I actually did this, at a former open-office-floor-plan job from hell. It was the only way to get a damn thing done - pretend you were wearing headphones.
Idiots didn’t notice the dangling cord and talked about me “behind my back” when I could hear everything said … but that’s a story for another time, another thread.)
Depending on the person, this could be an awkwardly-phrased way of asking, “Do you have time to talk right now?”
Sure. I usually ask is this a good time? Once I was snapped at by a coworker “why do you think I answered the phone? Of course it is”
But then she usually answers her work calls with “talk to me!”
Is this some kind of not-so-scandalous version of Chinatown?
I once had the opposite happen. I was walking toward an intersection with a two-way stop where the cross street did not have to stop. A car is approaching on the cross street and despite the fact that I was at least ten feet from the curb comes to a full stop. Apparently he assumed that I was going to suddenly break into a full run so I could cross the street before he got there. Net result: he has to sit there for nearly a minute while I finish walking to the curb, then wait while I stop and make eye contact to assure myself that he’s not going to decide to drive in front of me, and then wait for me to cross the street in front of him. If he had just kept moving he would have been well through the intersection before I got to the street.
I’ve seen and experienced most of these driving peeves. As most of us have.
It’s become obvious to me that many (most?) drivers utterly suck at projecting relative motion into the future. They literally cannot look at you and they converging on a point in the road and decide which will get there first if nothing changes. Doesn’t matter if it’s another car, a bicycle, or a pedestrian they see. Doesn’t matter how long they might sit there observing passively as both parties continue closing on the crossing spot. So of course they have no idea how any braking or accelerating they do will change that. So no way to decide which to use.
Their entire repertoire of driving behavior is: I see a crossing of paths developing that I am powerless to assess further. Therefore I must stop completely somewhere short of the crossing point and wait until it resolves itself by the other person’s action.