Things that infuriate you well beyond their actual importance

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. To get to Pittsburgh we took Rt 60 south. I moved away for ten years and when I came home, somehow 60 South was now 376 East. Changing the route number I can overlook but how did PennDOT change the direction of the road?

(Being a good Pennsylvanian, I still call it 60 and you know damn well what I mean.)

When I see this, I comment, “Oh, hey, someone left some time on the parking meter! I get 35 free seconds!”

Heh, US 285 out of Denver goes West for about 100 miles (I’ve driven it hundreds of times, it’s one route into the mountains). But then it turns south.

Sign from Denver says US 285 South. Well that’s correct (eventually), but always bugged me.

In Boone NC, US 421 and US 221 are like that. If you’re going north on one, then you are going south on the other. It makes sense when you know the larger situation.

At the interchange in Canton (near Boston), I-95 North merges with US 1 South and Route 128 North, heading west/northwest around Boston.

This layout is a result of the cancellation of the “Southwest Expressway” in the 1970s, which was originally planned to bring I-95 directly into Boston. As a compromise, I-95 was redirected onto the existing Route 128 circumferential highway.

As a result, drivers going toward the north shore (logically going “north”) can find themselves on a road signed as I-95 North, Route 128 North, and US 1 South simultaneously.

Even more confusingly, nobody in Boston refers to I-95. They all call it Route 128, even though the interstate signs on the actual roadway are much more prominent.

Thanks, all. I’d still be interested to see any other examples of the same stretch of highway signed with the same number in two opposite directions (e.g., where you can simultaneously drive on Route 60 North and Route 60 South).

How would that be possible?

See above:

Northbound US 19 Truck exits PA 51 at a left exit, turning toward the westbound parkway, which also contains a right-in/right-out ramp for Woodville Avenue. The ramp merges into the southbound US 19 mainline ramp, forming a wrong-way concurrency, but remains separated from the Penn–Lincoln Parkway via a Jersey barrier. The ramp travels for roughly half a mile (0.80 km) in this fashion before making a U-shaped curve. Before this ramp passes under the parkway, it merges with southbound US 19 Truck (which exits the Penn–Lincoln Parkway from the Fort Pitt Tunnel), forming a wrong-way concurrency with itself.

Gotcha. Pretty strange. This reminds me of the exit from I-395 South to CT Route 2 in Norwich, CT. There is no direct exit to Route 2 East, but you can get off the on the Route 2 West exit, then get on the I-395 North exit, then get on the Route 2 East exit. So you do three 270-degree turns on exits to go 90 degrees to the right. But I don’t do this because it makes me carsick. :nauseated_face:

My city-engineer friend tells me that you can almost always identify which corner of an intersection by asking N S E W, or Inbound / Outbound, or … etc. Different people have different frames of reference.

When I mentioned the Sun and the City above, I was just using those as example frames of reference. My wife has no idea how the house relates to any frame of reference other than the street out in front. She can drive from here to any known point in the city, but in spite of the sun, and the moon, and the prevalent winds, and maps, when standing in the house, she is only correct that the road is in front of the house. Anything else, like “the shops are over that way” is detached from reality. She does not use an absolute frame of reference: she uses a floating frame of reference Forward, Left, Right. Curved roads or future corners aren’t under consideration: Not that she gets that wrong, rather, not part of the way she understands the world.

This is so strong that she is unable to correctly connect even our house, where she has lived for years, to an absolute frame of reference like Map East, or Sun, City, or Upwind.

Myself, I have to think to know right from left. If I depended on road scripts to get where I’m going, I’d be just as likely to pull out of the driveway and head off in the wrong direction.

Well, bad voiceover is a hundred times better than videos that cover half of the action with burnt-in subtitles. That seemed to start about 10 years ago. It became really annoying when not just janky YouTubers but big media sites like the NYTimes started doing it.

I’ve wanted for a while to make a parody video that has famous intense images covered over with Chyrons/CGs/lower-thirds. Like, the Zapruder film with words directly over JFKs face as he is shot.

If you’re dead-set on having CGs instead of voiceover at least put them over black that’s squeezed off to the side.

Two completely unrelated things:

  1. Autocorrect. Sometimes when I’m out for a walk and see a personalized license plate I will use my phones Notes app to jot it down so I can post it in the custom license plates thread later. Except because custom license plates are almost never correctly spelled English words, autocorrect keeps attempting to “fix” them. Yes, I really meant to type “LATIB :heart: G”. Quit changing it to “Latin”! There is an “undo” button to revert back to what I actually typed, but it’s still annoying to actually do that.
  2. Recipes titled “Marry Me [something]”, eg. “Marry Me Chicken” or “Marry Me Meatballs”. Apparently the name is meant to imply that this dish is so good that if you cook it for your sweetheart they will want to propose. I’m mostly annoyed just because it seems to be overused, but also by the implication that you (presumably a woman) can’t just directly propose to your partner, you need to get them to do it by cooking this for them.

I’m glad Wildabeast brought up the Marry Me recipe titles with their role implications. My cooking culture is way too old-fashioned. I’m going to make a change to not be that way.

Wait until you try my Never Call Me Again Meatloaf

It can’t be worse than my “Not even if you were the last man in the world” Lasagna.

You should try my, Can I At Least Get a Handjob Souffle.

I’m pretty sure my wife once made I Saw You Staring At That Waitress casserole, and it was not a pleasant experience.

And there was plenty enough for leftovers the next day as well.

If your phone camera supports a live text feature, you could point the camera at the plate, then tap on the text of the plate, copy it, and paste it into the Notes app.

Another alternative is to use the phones digital assistant to take a note using voice commands and just spell out the plate.

“Siri, take a note. L, A,T, I, B, heart emoji, G.”

This one would also fit well in the “stupidest software design” thread: when software has some sort of failure, it always blames the user.

Windows is notorious for this, or at least it used to be. For example, as far back as Windows 95, the system would crash, and once I’d rebooted the computer a message would come up saying something like “CHKDSK needs to run because you didn’t shut down the system properly.”

Another good example: every MMO I’ve ever played. The game would go down for whatever reason, and the message it would display was “you need to check you internet connection,” implying “it couldn’t possibly be us that is the problem.” And yet, 100% of the time, it was them that was the problem!

This came to mind because I got an email from a client this morning, who isn’t so great with computers. Intuit had emailed her, saying that one of her bank accounts had become disconnected in Quickbooks Online. And, they said the most common reason for this is the user (my client) changing access priveleges within their account on the bank’s website.

Of course, my client had done no such thing, nor had I. Quickbooks drops connections all the time. I can never be sure if Intuit or the bank is the problem, but I can say with 100% confidence that the problem is never the user.

Grrrrrr.

They’re pointing out the end you can do something about, I suppose. If I was the programmer I’d word it, “Game connection lost. Please check your end while we check ours.”