Persistent people who feel the need to show me every picture in their wallet or purse. Especially pictures of their spouses or girlfriends/boyfriends. Even if their loved ones look as if they fell out of the ugly tree, what am I going to say? I hate being in a position where I have to lie.
I do think there is something to the theory that this person, who rubs us the wrong way, is manifesting some trait we fear we possess, inside, though we may not manifest it.
This makes sense to me - the people who irritate me most are self-obsessed, boastful types - you know the kind, every story revolves around them, and if it doesn’t they’ll find a way to turn it round to them, they dominate the conversation and never shut up even when it’s perfectly clear they’re boring everyone to death…
Thing is, I’m very aware of this tendancy in myself, and I really watch myself for it - consciously shutting myself up if I sense I’ve been talking too long, forcing myself to ask questions and take an interest in other people - because I’m all too aware of just how annoying it can be.
I haven’t ever managed to stop being irritated at such a person, but I have tried to learn how to maintain a high level of tolerance when it is required. The perfect solution is to remove that person from your life somehow, but it’s not always possible.
“How to tolerate people” was a learned skill for me. I used a kind of poor man’s CBT (self-distraction techniques).
This is so true for one person who rubs me the wrong way. I see too much of myself in her. She has all the bad traits I try very hard to suppress…only she doesn’t think of them as bad traits. She glories in them and expounds on them and I cringe everytime I’m around her because I’m afraid people will start to see the ways we are similar. But we’re not…all our core beliefs are so far removed from one another. It’s just certain things she does.
The worst part is, I hired her. And then after she left, and we all sighed a sigh of relief that she was gone, when we got into a bind, I recommended re-hiring her. Which just boosted her ego to the point that she felt we couldn’t survive without her. Since then, she has come back and left so many times…fortunately, not at a location I work at…that finally she has been coded as not-rehirable based on her actions at the last job. When she called our store a few days ago to ask me a question, my blood literally ran cold at the thought that somehow she was working for us again, until I realized she was just asking a general question. And when I mentioned that she had called to my coworkers, they all had the same visceral reaction!
I’m currently caught in a situation like this with someone I’m involved with creatively. I could name a million little things about the guy that bother me, but they wouldn’t add up to the way that he truly just rubs me the wrong way on a visceral, animal level. I literally can hardly stand to be in the same room as the guy, but I can’t even articulate why.
Of course most examples are about coworkers. Where people are picked because they can do the job and not because you might like to have lunch with them.
I don’t find that many people irritating, but there are a few types that upset me and they probably shouldn’t. The biggest one is people who mindlessly follow social norms even when it’s impractical. The most distressing subtype of this are people who have to buy more expensive things to compete with others. It is their money and they are free to do whatever they want with it, but for fucks sake think about why you want to buy $300 shoes or a gold watch.
Another thing I find irritating is delusional people. People who grasp onto an idea like their life depended on it being true, to the point of ignoring everything you can say to disprove the idea. Most often the idea doesn’t hurt other people, so there should be no reason for me to be upset that they believe it, but I still find it grating that someone can be so willing to ignore reality.
I worked retail in a liquor store. There was only one customer who I disliked with a passion who really did nothing to deserve it. She was a middle aged woman (probably in her late 40s) who bought a bottle of cheap Pinot Grigio almost every day. She always dressed like a five year old girl. She wore her hair in either a pony tail or sometimes in pig tails. Sometimes, she had either pink or purple ribbons in her hair. Her clothes were mostly a combination of pale pink, purple and green, and they often had pictures of flowers.
What made it worst was that she felt she had a relationship with the store staff because she shopped there everyday. She would often try to make small talk and I would often do my best to ignore her. She upset me too much. She’s a forty year old drunk who dresses like a little girl. If I think anymore about her this post will become nothing more that me calling her indecent names for next 10 minutes.
Had a friend a couple of years ago that really drove home the idea of being rubbed the wrong way by people with traits that you don’t like in yourself. He was everything I had been trying to change about myself, in spades, on steroids and cranked up to 13. Finally ended the friendship over a lot of that kind of stuff building up to the point of realizing that perhaps the only reason I’d been trying to maintain the friendship was due to the inner Zeal of the Convert, trying to get him to change all those bad aspects of his personality that I had been so hard at work trying to change in myself.
Otherwise yeah, a lot of the people I instinctively dislike are people with values that are seriously opposed to my own.
Yes, his name was Tim and he was one of my least favorite subordinates ever. When Tim was growing up, his Mom or Dad must have told him that the other kids didn’t like him because he was smarter than they were, because by golly Tim went out of his way to let you know that he had (but turns out that he was in fact only getting it then) his masters in History, which apparently meant that he knew everything and he could pontificate at length on any number of subjects he knew ittle about. He knew interesting things we didn’t too, like the fact that an object that was 6cm x 6cm x 6cm wasn’t necessarily geometically a cube and that it’s possible to pluralize a word with an apostrophe. If anyone dared correct him, he’d drown them out with loud bombastic statements until people gave up so he might shut up. Tim was so smart that he never needed to take notes - despite the fact that he often failed post-training tests that he might have passed if he bothered with the note-taking that was beneath him; this refusal to deign to take notes presisted even after he spent three days training items and failing every training. Worse yet, despite not knowing his ass from his elbow, he’d confidently tell new people how to do things, which would then have to be corrected. Everyone who worked with Tim found him insufferable, both people with the same position as his and those of us above him.
I don’t miss him.
Oh, gee, where do I start?
People who subtly interject their college degrees into every conversation. On the same token, people who hang their college degrees on the wall behind their desk.
Very ambitious people who will do anything to advance another rung on the corporate ladder.
People who always come up with excuses for their laziness and irresponsibility. Along the same lines, people who mooch off the government and family members.
People who purchase status items in an effort to impress people (latest fashions, fancy new cars, fancy new homes).
People who are always telling little fibs and lies. God, I know so many people like this.
People who always talk with an intellectual flair, and constantly use “big & obscure” words in an effort to impress people.
People who treat anyone “under them” with contempt. You know the type… they *enjoy *giving wait staff a hard time at the restaurant.
Individuals who manifest an inferiority complex. 
I hate elitism, which is funny, because I always feel like I’m straddling that line myself. It’s hard not to buy into certain values when you’re immersed in them. I don’t think academic achievement is the measure of a person, but I want good grades anyway. I don’t think a successful career dictates the value of a person’s life but I’d like to have one anyway.
I think my biggest pet peeve overall is people who patronize others. I get really annoyed when people on the Dope talk about how stupid humanity is. Having a different opinion or different cultural values != stupid. Not valuing formal education != stupid.
That said, you better be damn sure my degree’s going up on my office wall when I finish it. I’m working way too hard and changing way too much not to honor that experience.
I don’t dislike people who have traits I hate in myself, but I do like people who have traits I lack. I’m not very assertive or outgoing, so I’m drawn to really dynamic and confident personalities.