Which brings me to mail addressed to “Current Resident”. Last week I received a letter from the city of McAlester, OKlahoma, addressed to someone who I guess had previously lived in my house “or Current Resident”. It was the city’s annual water quality statement. Thanks, but I live in a suburb of Houston, so McAlester’s water quality is not really an issue for me.
I recently stayed a week in the Outer Banks with my sister and her boyfriend, and I was grateful for the invitation, but the guy had a couple of habits that were of course meant in the best of spirits, but would bug me unreasonably nonetheless. The first was his habit of asking “sleep well?” the moment he saw me for the first time each day. Actually I don’t sleep all that well at any time, but there’s no point in discussing it because there’s not much anyone else can do about it.
The other was asking if I wanted something every five minutes, which really did drive me potty, even though I feel ashamed to be annoyed by something so trivial and well-meaning. I’d be sitting there comtemplating the sunset or whatever, and every few minutes: “would you like a beer? A Pimms? A bit of salad? Some ice cream? There’s fresh beets I just cooked…” on and on. Dude, thanks but I know where everything is, including the stuff I brought myself, and my legs still work. Ease up, already.
I get annoyed when people at work (or anywhere else) steal my whistle. I’ll start to whistle a tune then some jerk off a few feet away will start to whistle another tune! :mad:
Many USB jacks have the symbol embossed on the up side. That way I can orient it by touch. Then there’s the ones that have embossing on both sides, or (worse) have “SAMSUNG” or something embossed on the down side, and more prominently than the symbol, which is totally not cool. The extra 30 seconds it takes to figure out what’s what could’ve been used to think of other petty annoyances.
Exactly. The iPod cord has an apple on the down side, which is totally counter-intuitive to me. The brand symbol should be on top, to my way of thinking.
Go buy a bottle of nail polish in “hooker red” or some other bright color (I use coral) and put a big stripe on the top side of all USB plugs and similar cables.
If you don’t mind adorning your devices, you can put a matching dot on the top side of your ports.
Yoga Grunter. I went to a seriously hard “beginner’s” yoga class last week because I really think serious yoga practice will help with my running injuries and make me stronger for the Mud Run that somehow I agreed to do, okay? And it was humiliating because most of the other people there were twenty years older than I was and I was the only one who had to drop out of poses.
And then there was Yoga Grunter. Grunting and gasping his way through it. God, I wanted to murder him with my strap.
The smooth (non-seam) side of a USB plug is usually on top. I still haven’t figured out the ones that plug in sideways, though.
If I were marking connectors with nail polish, I’d put the red dot on the side I didn’t have to look at when it was plugged in correctly. Red dot means stop and turn it over.
All these reality shows bug me. I know I don’t have to watch but sometimes when I go over friends’ houses they broadcast commercials showing yet another reality show.
The latest one is something called “Bar Rescue” where people just go into bars/nightclubs and make recommendations on how to improve them. They of course cannot just go in and say “Move this over there and paint that wall a brighter color.” No they have to get crazy and throw the old chairs out into the street because they are so hideous etc. Basically it is an excuse to make something out of nothing.
Are we - Americans here - really so bored with life that we will watch just about anything? I am going to come up with a reality show called “watching paint dry” which will start with two painters finishing up a room and then have 45 min of the paint actually drying.
Get outside people! There is a whole world going on out there.
I have the opposite problem - I’m usually the slowest eater at any table, and I’m always finishing my meals alone, with everyone else sitting there with nothing in front of them. I have more than once just stopped eating before I was full because it was getting too embarrassing to eat so slowly.
Either you mean escalators, or you have some strange elevator habits.
My tiny peeve with ordering fast food is that I often want just the burger, no fries and no drink, so I’ll order just a burger - “I’ll have the quarter pounder, please,” and odds are great that they’ll ring it in as a combo. If I wanted a combo, I would have added the word “combo” to my sentence. In all fairness, though, I get why they do that - most people do order a combo.
Don’t get me started. I resent the fact that I’m paying extra for the “convenience” of “E-Z-open” packaging that doesn’t work. Aren’t these things tested before they’re made? And why the hell does a bag of coffee filters need a zip-lock to preserve freshness?
So many fucking bags at the grocery store! Yes I know I could have brought my own bags, but I’m lazy and forgetful. I don’t mind the bags, but when they take the five small items I carried to the register without a basket and put it in 3 bags (and one double bagged for good measure) Jesus Christ on a pogo stick knock it off!
I hate McDonald’s drive-through ordering speakers. When you pull up, a voice says, “Hi, welcome to McDonald’s, please order when ready.” So I start ordering, and then another voice answers, “Hi, may I take your order?” Apparently, the first voice is a recording, and they really aren’t ready to take your order. If the recording said, “Hi, welcome to McDonald’s; we’ll take your order in just a few moments,” it would probably be much nicer.
The second thing happens at almost every place I eat. I cannot eat onions, and so I go out of my way to make sure my food doesn’t have any onions in it. So I’ll tell the order-taker, “I’d like the [food item], and make sure it doesn’t have onions in it.” I hate it when they tell me, “Sir, the [food item] doesn’t come with onions.” OK, great! No need to tell me that.
Mr. Coffee coffee-machine filter baskets have plastic ridges at the bottom which presumably allow the coffee to flow through the bottom of the filter and into the pot. These ridges make it absolutely impossible to clean the fucking things, which is why any pot of coffee after the first made in a Mr. Coffee tastes like ass.
I was just thinking this very thing the other day. Paper needs to be fresh? Who knew? Unlike brown sugar, of course, which usually is sold in a cardboard box with an internal bag you cannot open unless you basically shred the top, and which if you don’t repackage it in a resealable bag will turn into a brick exactly one hour before the next time you want to use it.
Bags at the grocery store: What is the darn point of having a separate bag for each of several single items? Why, when I say, “I’d like just paper bags, please,” do they stuff the paper bag inside a plastic bag, which I just said I didn’t want? There is a practical method for bagging groceries, which appears to be on its way to being extinct.
Oh, and while I’m at it, <shakes cane> You kids get off my lawn! </shakes cane>
Recently, they starting charging for grocery bags in our city. So, you need to ask for the number of bags you need BEFORE THEY ARE BAGGED. How do I know how many bags it will take? Arg! It’s not like I have two items here. I have a cartful of groceries.
(I understand I am supposed to bring my own bags but firstly, unless I am washing them with each use, eeewwww. And if I do wash them it defeats the purpose of saving the environment. Also, I reuse the bags for garbage and kitty litter.)
Can I ask you about this? I don’t understand what could happen unless you’re somehow consuming unprepared food that has been touching the inside of the bag. They do need to be cleaned periodically, like anything else, but I don’t understand why it matters if they’re sanitary.
In the spirit of the thread, grocery cashiers who put things (meat, produce) into extra plastic bags. Look, the chicken is already wrapped in plastic, and the bleach is not going to leach out of its container and into the milk. I understand that things sometimes do leak, but if I were worried about it I would have availed myself of one of the thirty thousand plastic bags available throughout the store.
Maybe it’s just Entertainment Tonight* that does this (and boy, that show is just designed to bug me), but everyone on there is going to Speak Out! about something.
To me, “speak out” carries a connotation of rising up against an injustice, righting a wrong, something heroic like that. But on Entertainment Tonight, it’s constantly “Larry the Cable Guy speaks out about his new cologne!” No, he’s just speaking. And why are we even listening?
