While demons with leaf blowers walk around you moving leaves around in a circle.
I don’t think I can sleep tonight…
Public transport often provides glimpses of hell.
Some recollections of a recent four hour journey on Virgin trains here in the UK:
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delayed start, and endless delays thereafter, thoroughly derailing (ha ha) my plans for the day
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no chance to rest at all, because of the incessant loud, ear-shattering ‘bing bongs’ tannoy announcements about crap that nobody needs or wants to know
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people with Walkmans and iPods turned up so loud that even with them ten seats away, I can name every track they’re listening to, and none of it is music I like
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people with very loud, stupid so-called ‘fun’ ringtones on their phones, and their phone rings every ten minutes and they always take about 40 seconds to answer it while the rest of us sit through three or four loops of their ‘amusing’ ring tone based on a catchphrase from a TV ‘comedy’ show that hasn’t been on air for three years
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people having loud and irritating phone calls that are all about 50 times longer than they need to be in terms of the actual information transfer (just because you can find 16 different ways to say ‘I’ll look it over when I get to the office’ doesn’t mean you have to or should)
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screaming infants. And I do mean ‘screaming’. As if someone was jabbing their feet with a knife. For hours. And the parents couldn’t care less. Lots of the time, I think the parents’ attitude is, ‘I have to put up with this infernal noise, so I figure the rest of you should have to as well’.
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toddlers and young children treating the train carriage as one vast playpen and adventure playground, often causing a nuisance, sometimes just being intensely irritating, and sometimes posing a danger to themselves or others (eg running at full speed into the knees of someone who was, at the time, trying to safely convey a tray of very hot drinks to his table). The parents? Couldn’t care less. Or too busy on the phone. Or had removed themselves to go and smoke a cigarette somewhere.
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clumps of bigots, racists, fools and other runts of humanity having loud-mouthed boorish and deeply offensive ‘conversations’, audible across several postal districts, for the duration of the journey, with copious swearing and abundant abusive terms concerning women or ethnic groups or whatever else. Why is society producing people who are literally incapable of expressing any thought, even an interest in having a cup of coffee, without including some version of the f-word?
Yep, I’m evolution of galaxies and clusters, mainly galaxies.
My idea of hell: eternity in a windowless room reducing shedloads of radio data and getting no results. Alternatively, a Virgin train at 5:30 on a Friday evening between Birmingham and London, for most of the same reasons Ianzin says.
Waiting at a crowded dentist’s office for an unavoidably painful procedure, with nothing to distract you except for The O’Reilly Factor.
I’m pretty sure it would involve handling raw ground beef while wearing stiletto heels and 100% polyester clothes outdoors during the day in the heat and high humidity.
Philip Pullman had a good one in the His Dark Materials trilogy: a bottomless pit that, if you fall in, you just keep on falling. You suffer agony as you starve to death, then your body eventually decays, but your conscious soul carries on falling, alone, for eternity.
Um…while we’re on the subject. I call dibs on the purple Fanta gal.
Being locked in a room full of liberals bitching about Bush and how he is responsible for everything from 9-11 to toenail fungus. And no Fanta headphones to be had.
Toenail fungus? I KNEW it!
I have a few pockets of Hell–
One would be stuck at Christmas dinner with my monster’s racist bigoted brother and his social climbing family, with no possibility of escape.
Another is the room where I’m chained to an easy chair. There are no books within my reach, although they tantalizingly line the walls. I have a remote control and a television that only gets reruns of Full House, Charles in Charge, Fear Factor, and Cops. Snacks? Oh, yeah, all the Clamato juice, V-8 juice, and fried pork skins I could possibly eat.
And how about the room where I spend eternity as secretary to jerks who cannot spell or punctuate properly, and insist that I type everything exactly as they wrote it out? I also have the cow-orker who asks me every day how to do things, takes extensive notes, and then hides them in her desk. She also hides the mail and gets every report horribly wrong, thus forcing me to go fix them.
There’s also a room where I submit beautiful, incredible manuscripts to editors, who reject everything I submit because all they want is Harlequin novels or horrible Buffy/Angel books written by people who don’t know the canon and who don’t know how the characters speak.
Oh, gosh, I just thought of another one—being stuck in the same room with my mother who’s just eaten everything in sight at Souper Salad!
Someplace that has snow.
Oh wait, I already live in a place like that. Oops.
Like I’d make something like that public knowledge. 
I know where I’m going to end up. I don’t need to make it any worse for myself. 
Doing long division without a calculator, while all the other kids are in the pool on a beautiful sunny weekend, splashing around and shrieking in fun.
In a Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve. Possibly standing in a line.
On an endless bus ride with a bunch of people you don’t know and who talk to everyone but you. Whenever you try to engage them in conversation, they answer “HUH?”
I despise that noise.
A shopping mall at Christmas time.
No wait -
O’Hare airport during the holidays.
No wait -
O’Hare airport while they’re doing construction in the areas where you check in.
Yeah. That’s it.
O’Hare airport while they’re doing construction in the areas where you check in.
Wait. That’s where I’ll be Sunday when I drop off the child for his trip to AZ! :smack:
Being locked in a room where the only noise is an endless loop of a program produced at the station where I work. It has been on the air, inexplicably, for more than 10 years. It is the worst, most egregious misuse of airwaves ever conceived. The “guests” are teenagers who are the bottom-feeders in their classes, and they must come and be on the show to earn an extra credit to flag their failing grades. So they are idea-less, inarticulate and have about a quarter of an idea about anything. Don’t get me started on the host.
Oh yeah, and there would be no razor blades in the room.
I realize most of these are ‘humor’ looks at personal hells, but I’ll share one that isn’t so much one.
As a brief explaination, for the past five months I’ve been having a pretty recuring series of nightmares that wake me, shivering. The nightmares themselves aren’t identical, but the theme almost always is.
My friends are dying. Horrifically.
And I can’t do anything but watch.
This, I suspect, is my hell.