I cannot stand it when I receive an email from someone who cannot fathom the concept of using punctuation & capitalization . I won’t even go into sentance structure.
Here is the exact email from a friend of mine that I haven’t seen in about three years.
**Hi – are you snowed in??? took us forever yesterday
to dig out. kids still dont have school, but geoff
had to go in today. i have a bit of running around to
do so we will stop in to have lunch with geoff. think
i will take the kids sledding this afternoon too.
oh no, they are fighting again, got to run, have a
good day, kristen **
I am hardly an punctuation nazi, but c’mon. Show you care. Use your fucking brain. I mean, you graduated from college for christsake!
One of my great friends (whom I have unsuccessfully tried to lure over here) is extremely intelligent. A killer scrabble player. Has worked as an editor. Also a great writer. But in email, for reasons she herself cannot explain, she has adopted a no-punctuation, no-capitals style. It * works*; it even seems to fit her.
But I suppose it might drive me ape if anyone else did it.
Pisses me the fuck off when my father does my laundry for me. He doesn’t do it the way I do it (read: right). And I’ve told him time after time after time after time. He doesn’t understand why I don’t appreciate him doing me a favor. :rolleyes:
Some days I think I should take out the part about my being an 18 year old female college student in my AIM profile. I seem to attract the most illiterate 14 year old boys online. Is it really so fucking arduous to type “you” instead of “u,” or “are” instead of “r”?? Are the other two letters so far away from your grubby little fingers that it’s impossible to reach over and hit them?
And don’t get me started on the Indian guys who see my name is Anjali and immediately think “Hey! Potential wife!”
My biggest pet peeve is <b>people who don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom</b>. This is especially gross after said offender just did number two. I always exit a public restroom with a paper towel in hand so I can open the door and leave without directly touching the fecal-and-urine-bacteria-covered doorknob. To me, touching a dirty bathroom doorknob is the same as plunging your hand into a just-used and unflushed toilet.
Ewww. A year and three months ago, the safety slogan of the month at the casino I used to work at was a request to please wash your hands after using the bathroom. The slogan was suggested en masse after an epidemic of **food service workers being observed leaving the stalls and returning to their workstations without performing the necessary ablutions. The slogan was prominently placed near the sinks in the bathrooms.
Apparently, this had no effect. About two months later, I developed severe stomach problems. At least once, if not two or three times a week, if I wasn’t extremely careful about what I ate, I would develop severe stomach pain, then my stomach would start to bloat, and I would feel absolutely wretched for several hours until I would vomit, I swear more than I had actually eaten for the last three days. I made three different trips to the doctor, had blood work, an ultrasound (an ulcer was suspected, but never found). They never did quite figure out what was wrong. Eventually it cleared up on its own. To this day, I’m convinced I picked up some kind of infection by eating the food in the employee cafeteria, handled by these pigs who couldn’t take thirty seconds to apply some soap and water after taking a dump.
Where I’m working now, there are actually newspaper articles posted near the sinks on the importance of hand washing. Personally, I think they should be inside the stalls. There is a wall separating the stalls from the sinks, which means that if you’re reading the article, you’ve aleady washed your hands, and if you’re disinclined to do so, you won’t see the article.
Ditto on the bathroom etiquette thing.
Also smoking.
Hate, hate, hate traffic and rubber neckers.
Hate left lane hogs.
Cannot stand poverty - especially those damned beggars on the streets.
Plenty of other things that I can think of that bother me but right now, Wildest Bill is making a strong bid for a spot in the top five on my list.
People who ask for help then argue with you about your suggestion.
The toilet thing bothers me too…icky
People who talk down to you…I’ll smack that condensing tone right off your face!
Jeepers. You haven’t communicated for three years and all she has to say is:
It snowed here a lot.
No school today.
Geoff went to work.
I have to run some errands.
I will have lunch with Geoff.
I will take my children sledding.
My kids are fighting.
Goodbye.
College graduate? Her brain is rotting from an overdose of Momness and Housewifery! Don’t you care about her?! You were friends, once!! Get her into some extension courses before she e-mails again!! :eek:
My e-mail pet peeve are people who forward those sappy tear-jerker stories/poems that are inevitably followed by: “Pass this along to 5 women and your wish will come true.”
My SD pet peeve are people who: C&P every single sentence from another’s post and answers/attacks it, line by mundane line.
People who stand around bullshitting while blocking aisles, doorways, etc.
Drivers who try to go to the front of the line for a turn lane knowing full well they had a half mile to get over, and then wave like “Oops, can you let me in?”
My roommate talks back to the TV, or asks random questions of me while we’re watching something. I really like her, but she’s making me crazy. “Why’d they do that?” “Wouldn’t that explosion do more damage?” At first I assumed these were rhetorical questions and did not answer. She started repeating them. I’m running out of answers. I have broken up with a guy for this sort of behavior. I guess the upside is that when she’s home the temptation to hang out and watch TV is just about equal to the temptation to do my homework.
I have come to look forward to the email glurge. As soon as somebody sends me something, they get added to my glurge-only list, then I happily pass the crap on to all of them. I also add people who just bug me for random reasons to this list.
One of these days, I’m going to have to post my list of Craps Rules on this message board.
My favorite is people who put their bets down in front of another player and don’t say anything. And continue not to say anything when I pick the money up and ask the person it is in front of, “Is this your bet?” and the person I’m talking to nods. Then when the bet hits, they scream because I payed the person I booked the bet out loud and set it up for.
Craps dealers have been telling players from time immemorable “Sir/ma’am, if you want to make a bet, set the money down here in front of you (pointing to the spot where the money should be placed), and tell me what you want and I’ll set it up for you.” Players have traditionally responded by smiling, nodding and continuing to put their money in front of other players, or throwing it into the box numbers, where it can get lost, or behind the dealer’s working stacks of chips…
This phenomenon is documented on ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets, Egyptian papyri from the Ptolemaic age, and even in Aboriginal cave paintings in Australia.
IM idiots who search for girls. People like this make me afraid of contacting perfectly good people, on the off chance I could be mistaken for such a being. (I can’t spell either, so we do have some things in common.)
People (like Wildest Bill) who think of sex as demeaning, bad, competitive, scary and wrong. (at least for girls)
My room not cleaning itself while I’m gone.
The showers going lukewarm when I want water heated over a lava pit and mostly vapor.
My random mutating insanities. I can stop my distress from leaking out in a specified way. I’m having nightmares, I stop them…but then I get some other bad thing.
Those stupid e-mails that ask erudite questions such as, “Favorite color?” and “First pet?” I get about 40 a week from otherwise intelligent people. I know you’re my friend, but I really did not need to know something so mundane as, “What color are your toenails today?”
When people do not flush the toilet after they’re done. It’s a public bathroom, people, flush the damn toilet! If it’s automatic and it doesn’t flush, it only takes about three seconds of looking to spot the thingy you need to press. It’s there, on every toilet: if yours does not flush automatically, grab some TP, wrap it around your fingers, and hit the stupid button. I do not need to be greeted with a smelly “Fuck you!” from your shit and piss every time I open the stall door.
That might seem trivial, but the public bathroom by my department is the one I use because it’s more conveniant than walking to the back of the warehouse.
Right turn on red, people. I know it’s hard when you’re dumber than asphalt, but if there is no oncoming traffic and you can make a safe right turn, go right ahead. I’m not an impatient driver, but that loooooong minute waiting for you to make a protected right turn on green is killer.
OK, on Route 43, there are three very obvious signs that say, “Right Lane Ends, XXX Feet.” So it narrows into one lane before merging onto Pulaski. But there’s always some idiot who has to speed ahead of everyone and get there five seconds faster and hold up traffic in their ridiculous effort to merge when, at the same point, people are trying to legetimately merge from the left.
I hate when people in line behind you anywhere feel that they have the right to stare at and analyze your purchases on the checkout lane. It’s like an announcer is saying over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have Sarah in Lane 7 purchasing a white lace bra, a Erykah Badu CD, and what’s that? Oh! Vaseline! There’s some kinky stuff going on at her place tonight! Someone, wuick, grab her wallet and get her address!”
Ok, maybe not. But even when I am buying fairly innocent items, the person behind me checks them all out and I can just imagine what they think I’m doing with brownie mix, a disposable camera, and a black lace nightie.
