Then isn’t that the opposite of the thread’s purpose?
Yes, but I had to post it somewhere or my head was going to explode. So sue me.
Gee, like every time I start a thread, people stick to the topic. :rolleyes:
Opposite or not, it gets my vote.
I will add the old-school version of your problem: Windows applications that steal focus when you are trying to do something else. This is something that should have been stamped out before Windows 95 hit the scene, but it persists to this day.
Webex is a particularly nasty offender–when I’m in a teleconference at work, doing other stuff in the background, possibly trying to solve the problem that the meeting is about, every time somebody breathes on the teleconference Webex steals focus and jumps to the front.
A slightly more modern version: iPhone prompts that pop up when you are driving or otherwise can do nothing about them. I’m trying to listen to an audio book or something like that, and a popup telling me to install the new iOS is there, making the phone useless until I can stop driving and click out of it.
And apps that ask me to rate them, while I am doing something important with the app, expecting it to do its job, get my fury–I have had my bible app ask me to rate it while I was speaking in front of the congregation and trying to look up a bible verse.
Oops…I think I’m ranting. I’ll stop.
God should smite that developer.
I must be the only one who is bothered by this, judging by how many people are doing it - honking your car to lock your doors. We had lunch in a parking lot at a grocery store the other day, and I counted 29 honks in the half hour we sat there. I remember when cars honked for a good reason, not all the freaking time.
Are you sure they are arriving? It’s a handy-dandy way of finding one’s car in a giant parking lot…click the lock button a few times and follow your ears to find where you parked.
Of course there is the obvious retort that one ought to be able to remember where they parked, after all, we did so for decades before key fobs existed. Nevertheless, it is a convenience that I take advantage of.
Clumsy combination of upper and lower case lettering on “home made” signs, like “APPIE PIeS.” Are you selling apple pies or appie ples (whatever that is), or appie pies?
Turning abbreviations into acronyms, like when the Operations Department becomes OPS.
Stick to the topic! It’s a pet peeve of mine! :D:D
This mainly bothers me when I have paid for the ad-free version of the app. I have now paid for Upwords, Blackplayer(a music player), and a few more. These all have free versions, but I like them enough to get the ad-free version.
Upwords asks me to rate it sometimes and I find that unprofessional for an app I have paid money for.
Yeah, they’re arriving. I usually see them drive up.
Mine, too, but only in my threads. 
A software development related one…
We all depend on Google to help us find our way out of our daily problems, and I often see the following exchange:
Noob: My system is configured as XYZ, and I want to do W, how do I do this?
Pedant 1: Why would you want to do that?
Pedant 2: Only a fool would use a configuration like XYZ. It’s terrible and inferior and will implode. Don’t bother trying to do W. Until you are ready to do it the right way don’t bother asking.
Pedant 3: Your question makes no sense. Everyone knows you shouldn’t do W like that.
and so on.
The pedants forget that in a corporate environment a software engineer is but a tiny cog. They cannot redesign the entire application. The DBA will not give them unrestricted access. The thing they want to connect to is often in another state or country and they cannot tweak it. They may be working on a 15 year old codebase and don’t want to rock the boat. They could be using an API written by some dude who left the company five years ago and nobody really knows where the source code is.
In short, they know exactly what they want to achieve, please stop telling them to redesign the entire application.
Happily, I find that StackOverflow seems to have hit the right formula and I see fewer of these responses and more helpful responses these days.
The one that bothers me more is the inappropriate use of present tense on TV news, especially when spoken in sentence fragments:
“Senator Whuzizface holding a press conference today.” No, the senator HELD a press conference three hours ago. He’s not holding it now. And even if he was, they should say the senator IS holding a press conference.
That’s another one of my pet peeves. “Jaywalking” is not the same thing as “crossing a street mid-block.” Here in Montana, the definition of jaywalking includes a certain minimum distance to the nearest traffic light. I live in a town with no traffic lights, hence there is no such thing as jaywalking here.
I don’t know where you live, but everywhere I’ve lived in the U.S., drivers are required to stop if a pedestrian steps into the road. You could be ticketed for not stopping unless it’s a divided highway.
It’s “retract”, not “walk balk”. Using “walk back” makes one sound like one is on the set of Romper Room or something.
Sorry, but if I’m travelling 60 MPH on a 2 line highway, and a pedestrian puts one foot on the road in the other lane, I’m not slamming my breaks on. I highly doubt that is the law.
Do you have two-lane roads with traffic whizzing by at 60MPH and pedestrian crosswalks?
(Darn, I’m full of pet peeves today–I’m surely a joy to be around)
On the idea of searching for stuff on the 'Net…
Can you be bothered to please put a DATE on your article?
Nobody wants to read your article about some cutting edge technology or late breaking news…from 2006. More correctly, nobody wants to be duped into thinking it is current.
No, but the point is there isn’t a crosswalk. Just a pedestrian crossing the road.
People calling something “a tie” when it’s a case of “more than one winner” but they could have had different results. It mainly applies to some of the categories in the Emmy Awards, where the voting works like this:
(a) Each voter can vote for any number of the nominees in that category, including none
(b) The nominee with the most votes wins an Emmy
© If more than one nominee gets a vote on at least 90% of the ballots, all of them get Emmys, even if one of them got more votes than the others.
I seem to be the only one (well, myself and whoever reads the result from the envelope at the ceremony, as the Television Academy doesn’t seem to use the word either) that doesn’t say that there was “a tie” when this happens.
The International Mathematical Olympiad (pretty much the “world championships” of high school level mathematics) does something similar; everyone in the top 5% or so is called a “gold medalist” without further distinction, even when only one person gets a perfect score.
Pet peeves that only I have, huh?
I have a galley kitchen, and if my husband wants to talk to me while I prepare dinner, he has to stand behind me. Stimulated by seeing me cook, he starts “helping” by doing fridge inventory and asking me to identify the contents of food containers or if something is old enough to toss. Just as I’m trying most to concentrate on the final touches to a dish, and trying to time everything so that it’s all ready at the same time!
Oh, and I’m guilty of leaving cupboards and drawers open a little bit. I think I developed the habit because of the noisy self-closing nature of the cabinets. If I just give them a good push, they’ll close all the way, but with a big bang. Since I do a lot of work in the kitchen early in the morning and I don’t want to wake anyone up, I don’t give them a push, but I also don’t carefully ease them closed. Takes too much time.