Little things that annoy the crap out of you

In My Humble Opinion
61

Some of us can’t help but to sneeze loudly. I hate it when I have to sneeze, but when I do I try to draw as little attention to it as possible. In spite of my best efforts, it still comes out so forcefully. There are people who can sneeze like a cat, but I don’t know how they can do it.

Likewise, I am annoyed by people who say “bless you” or something to acknowledge my sneeze. I don’t like attention drawn to my sneezing as it is and I wish people would just keep quiet about it if I do sneeze.

Getting back to the topic, I have a couple more to add:

People who park too damn close to my car! The other day someone parked his truck too close to the driver’s side door of my car. I had all of about 15 degrees of clearance to get my door open. I would have been better off getting in on the passenger’s side and then crawling across the seat. I wanted to leave the prick a copy of one of my not-so-nice messages for people who park this way, but this was at work and not a public lot.

Ring tones on cell phones drive me nuts. What’s wrong with a simple ringing sound? Hearing the William Tell Overture or Fur Elise played by a series of beeps because someone is getting a call does bad things to my blood pressure.

People littering my car with flyers. I call it “windshield spam”. I hate it when I have been in a store and come back out to my car, only to see that some schmuck has deposited a turd on my window in the form of an advertisement for weight loss or some other product or service I don’t want or need. One time a friend of mine said he went around the whole parking lot and collected the flyers and then put them in a big bag. He went to the place that was doing the advertising and dumped the whole mess right on the floor as he went into their building and then left.

People who don’t advance the calendar when a new month has started. I know this is a very petty annoyance, but it just bugs the hell out of me to see that someone’s calendar is still on the old month after a couple days have passed.

One of my dad’s biggest pet peeves is seeing an envelope that’s been ripped open with one’s finger, instead of using a letter opener or some other instrument to open it more neatly. I found this out the hard way when he saw a stack of envelopes that I had ripped open using my finger.

62

F-wits who:

  • Drive around with their windows down with cruddiest ‘music’ playing at the loudest volume. I mean, who gives a crap about what junk you’re listening to?
    Some solace is that they have to rack it themselves in a confined space, must be hell in there. Suffer in ya jocks, kiddies.
    (This peeve also applies to vehicles that been modified to make excessive noise. )

  • Just do not give a shit about what’s going around them. Whether it be slow drivers, idiots who stop in supermarket aisles, fools who meander down the middle of car park lanes, or who won’t yield any space on a footpath, etc.

  • Claim to like crap music, crap films and above all crap television.

63

The toilet paper dispensers in public restrooms, the kind that hold a great big huge roll of toilet paper. Without fail, these dispensers are mounted so low to the ground that you have to lean down and bend your wrist into an awkward position just to get a decent wad of toilet paper. Why can’t they mount them higher? And by the way, what’s up with that huge roll of toilet paper? They’re so big and heavy that half the time when you grab the end of the toilet paper and try to pull some off, the one sheet of paper your holding breaks off. After 5 minutes of scratching and clawing at the roll, you got nothin’ but a shredded handful of fuzz. WTF?

Art

64

… sorry, got to the party late …

“Gesundheit” has nothing do to with god. It’s from the German for “good health.” It’s perfectly acceptable for athiests.

Another phone-related one … why are there so many phone-related pet peeves? …

When people dial on speakerphone, and wait for you to pick up before they pick up their handset. Yes, speakerphone is a wonderful thing. Use it to dial, and pick up the handset while it’s ringing. Otherwise, the first sound I hear when I put my reciever to my ear is the alarmingly loud clatter of you removing your handset, before I hear a human voice. Very unpleasant. Is that extra three seconds of handsfree time really so important to you?

People who sit down without removing a stray piece of paper that’s on the seat, so it crinkles. Exacerbated if they see the paper and pull it out from under them - without raising their ass from the seat - so the crumpled paper is now crumpled even more, and probably torn. Just look where you sit, moron.

This woman who I work with who never takes less than ten minutes to give you a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ She is technologically illiterate and I am doing some computer stuff for her, and whenever I ask her anything - anything at all, like ‘Would you prefer if it was this way, or that way?’ she starts into her speil about how she just wants it to be user-friendly, and she doesn’t really understand what I’m saying so can I help her see, and this, and that, and the other, and then that other thing that she’s said to me at least a hundred times already, which I really don’t need her to say again because really, it’s quite irrelevant to the topic at hand (which is, ‘is the answer A, B or I have no preference?’) She’s really very nice but I dread calling her.

Also: Just about everyone on public transit. I love public transit, but I hate all of you. Please just get out of my way and let me get to work, and keep your germs and malodours and pointy elbows and cell phone conversations to yourself. Oh, and get out of my way. Thank you.

65

People that leave a mess behind. This is bad enough in a fast food restaurant, but in a park or forest preserve, stickily unacceptable.

66

On the ski slopes:

People who are not quite comfortable with the slope they’re on, and weave back and forth unpredictably, making them a general nuisance to get past.

People who stop suddenly in the middle of crowded or narrow slopes.

Snowboarders that gang up and sit across slopes, effectively blocking it off with their boards.

In lift queues, ski-poles can make a royal mess of the top of a snowboard. Maybe once you feel it slipping on a hard surface you could assume that scraping it about isn’t going to turn my board into snow!

Snowboarder hating skiers, and vice versa. The skier “we were here first” attitude is the same as that of many racists. Yes, there are a few bad apple snowboarders, but most are as conscious as the average skiers.

People in cable cars who preserve a nice little space around them, while people crammed in near the door literally are frozen in position for the entire ride.

Where everybody is strapping on their equipment, people who come along and start setting up right in front of somebody else. This is particularly problematic on a snowboard where you can only really rely on the fall line to get you moving at first. Doesn’t help when somebody sits across it!
I guess I spend too much time in the snow, but now’s the time to get out those rants. Moving on…

I would also like to cast my vote for doorway conversationalists, and those who do the same thing on stairways.

And the greatest mystery of all… Just who are these people who have such great difficulty flushing that unsightly turd away?

And ‘bless you’ people irritate off too, especially when you can practically see them polishing their haloes afterwards (note that this is not a cheap shot a religion).

And people who complain about starting a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘because’.

Circumlocutory parlance with erudite lexis and otiose metaphysics. Especially when passed off as intellect.

On rotating vending machines, people who like to rotate it all the way around several times. Most frustrating are those who seem incapable of keeping the button to do this depressed.

Mobile phones that cut to voice mail after about five rings, leaving little time for the owner to hear it ringing.

“How much did it cost?”
From Microsoft Word:

Fragment (consider reviewing)

The auto capitalization feature that I am too lazy to deactivate. That little i (Argh! It tried to do it again!) I typed was meant to be little!

When you paste words into a document from elsewhere, it replicates them in the same obnoxious font, size and colour, or perhaps peppered with cumbersome hyperlinks. 99% of the time I want it in the font I was already using.

Random reversion to the default font.
I could go on, but I think I’ve already betrayed the nature of my disposition.

67

Multi-flushers

They step up to the urinal, and before they’ve even unzipped, they flush. How many thousand gallons of water do they waste each year?
Clueless Computer Users

Computers have gotten too cheap and easy to use. Not all that long ago, it took a certain level of intelligence to use a computer and even more so to get online with anything - you had to know how to configure ports, (seven bits, even parity, two stop bits, or eight bits none and one stop?) and set the right configuration. (ATM0&C1&D2 and other such stuff) Now, anyone without a fundamental grasp of their country’s predominant language can get on the web and make a complete fool of themselves.
Apostrophes

Nobody know’s how to use apostrophe’s. Lets remove the thing’s from the language.
Spitting

Ick. Just ick.
People who don’t understand the Escalator Rule

Walk on the left, stand on the right. This rule also applies to people-movers in airports.
People who block the elevator/train/bus door when you’re trying to get past and/or people who charge onto the elevator/train/bus when you’re trying to get off.

For the latter, if they’d just wait two seconds, I’ll be off the train, and guess what I left behind? A space! Yes, a space plenty large enough for them to occupy comfortably. Either variety of offender who gets in my way is likely to get pushed back. Some people play rugby for fun - others ride the subway.

68

In my experience, it’s to keep the watch face from getting scratched, i.e. you’re less likely to bump the watch face into things with it facing in at your side versus facing out.

69

sorry

And speaking of computers, my newest little annoyance is that the board notifies me several times about one new post, or once when there are many new posts, or not at all. I hope they finish tweaking things soon.

70

This one is easy to overcome. Instead of using the default Paste, go to Edit → Paste Special … → Unformatted Text. This will copy just the text alone, and it will appear in the font you are already using.

71

I work in a grocery store. I hate seeing the half-eaten samples and pistachio shells all over the damn place. The samples are really our fault. We hand them out and we don’t have trash cans all over the store to collect the cups. The pistachio shells: not only are the people who do this slobs, they are thieves too. If you didn’t pay for it, you STOLE it!

About people having conversations in doorways and hallways- It’s ten times worse in the military. I hated walking down a hallway where two assholes with more rank than me are conversing. You HAVE TO show respect to them. Ugh :rolleyes: