Anyone (but me) vacuuming at home or if I’m in someone else’s home. It throws me into a 50/50 mix of rage and panic, and I have to suppress an urge to scream and bat at the person vacuuming. It probably has to do with my being a heavy sleeper in my teens. My passive-aggressive dad used to start vacuuming outside my bedroom when he thought it was about time to get up. If I didn’t, he’d open the door and vacuum* inside the room.* Got me up in the mornings, but gave me Pavlovian scars for life.
That little smacking sound some people make when they open their mouth to speak. You can hear the tongue un-glueing from the palate, the fleshy folds separating… aaargh!
Everything Mindfield said about grammar and punctuation. Thank you!
Wifely habits: Dim your dashboard lights, honey; you’re ruining your night vision.
Co-workers: My best was a guy who sat next to me; he chewed tobacco and spat into an empty Coke can on his desk. I never never never want to think about what was in that can.
Grammar:
It’s “all right.”
It’s “a lot.”
It’s “…needs to be sanded smooth” or “needs sanding smooth.” It is not not not “needs sanded smooth.” An otherwise very good model-building website is a major offender on this.
The usual “its” vs. “it’s” stuff
Driving: Side-by-side dawdlers.
Cooking: Where the hell did the last of the Chex Party Mix go?
The flick of the wrist required to turn on/off the blinker is too much strain on the mind for some folks. But I think that would disqualify one for a driver’s license.
Tailgaters. I had an asshole coworker (asshole in enough ways that I found another job!) who told me that he only tailgates to get the driver in front of him to speed up. I informed him that I slow down for people who do that. It’s the only way to get the following distance to match the speed. Tailgating is how you tell the other driver, “Slow down, please, because if you don’t, I will not have time to stop.”
“Alot,” (pronounced “Al-Ut”) is an ancient demonic deity who will enter our dimension and torture the souls of the living for eternity, according to my made-up prophesy. He is summoned by repeatedly writing his name.
To go with the locomotive sneezes “pitted” here, I add the ear splitting shriek that young girls do. My mother taught us (4 girls) to not do that–I loathe it in young females and made sure my daughter didn’t do it.
If any of you are not familiar with this noise, watch “Little Miss Sunshine”. About 10 minutes in, Olive does a wall to wall banshee imitation that has me quivering on the couch, cowering with ears covered…
My typos - I’ve been touch-typing for about 26 years now (and boy, are my hands tired! badumpbump), and I still make waaaaay too many typos. What gives, fingers?
I’m not sure how irrational it actually is, but I get really peeved at how hard it is to get a sub or sandwich made without cheese or mayo. I have to avoid both for dietary reasons, and it doesn’t matter how nicely or repeatedly I ask, they get it wrong about one third of the time. Even more irritating than an honest (if stupid) mistake is where the person making the sub tries to overrule me, declaring that that ‘it comes with that’. A common remark is, “You just want a dry sandwich?!”, as if I’m asking them to put rat poison on it.
Quizno’s seems to be the worst chain for this – they seem to have the most fixed formulas with pre-planned sets of ingredients. They also have a barrier that prevents you from watching them make the sub – what the hell’s up with that? Subway is a little more aimed at letting you get what you want (or don’t want). Blimpie’s is OK too.
A related peeve is how often I have to explain why I bring my own food to meetings or classes where lunch is brought in. My first answer to “Why did you bring that?” is a polite, “I like to bring my own food”. Reasonable people accept this, but they are a few assholes out there who demand to know why I’m not eating what they are. I explain that I have to avoid eggs and dairy products because I have ulceritive colitis, and go into as much detail as possible about what happens if I don’t. Indelicate, but it shuts 'em right up.
<singing>
The brakes on the bus
piss Sateryn off
Sateryn off
Sateryn off
The brakes on the bus
piss Sateryn off
All through the town.
I actually like the sound of backup beeps. What pisses me off are those who have no sense of where they are in space. These people seem to be attracted to me in supermarkets. We’ve pitted aisle boulders already, but the people in front of me in the checkout line today first had some issues, second, there was no bagger available and the husband clearly thought himself too important to bag during checkout, and third, when I got done, they were standing with their cart in the middle of the lane to get to the exit.
It’s lucky for me that California is not a concealed carry state.
People who eat in lifts - it’s all of 10 seconds, surely, from ground to their floor, so why must they subject me to the sounds of their chewing and swallowing, in the confined and quiet circumstances of the elevator? Drives me crazy.
You’re reminded me of another thing that irrationally bugs me. Our team at work is all supposed to go out for lunch together next week - I don’t want to go. I want to go to the lunch room and have a quiet lunch reading my book, eating food that won’t set off my ulcer that came back because of my job, but I don’t want to be an asshole and tell them I don’t want to go. Bah.
Irrationally mad? How about when my husband says, “we could always go with Scotch pine.” when we go get our tree. Every year for 20 years. We haven’t had a Scotch pine since our first year of marriage. We never get one. After the first one, HE didn’t want to get one. But he still says it, year after damned year. The kids just look at him (they get to pick the tree–they go between Frazier fir and Douglas).
Gah. Every freakin’ year. And I have no clue why it makes me so mad. Stupid reaction to a stupid thing. I’m still argh about it, 6 hours later. :rolleyes: to me.
For example, sometimes when MrWhatsit sneezes, it’s this loud screamy kind of sneeze that could wake the dead, and it scares the crap out of me for a split second before I realize, oh, that wasn’t someone being murdered in my front yard, it was my husband sneezing. But what am I going to do, tell him “Don’t sneeze, it bugs me”?
/QUOTE]
You’re not being irrational at all,there is no physical or biological reason for people to shout when they sneeze and that is exactly what Mr.Whatsit is doing.
The air for the shout is coming out of his mouth NOT his nose.
[ol]
[li]Woman who didn’t stop at a stop sign whilst on her cell phone. The same woman drove for 3 miles on the freeway with her left blinker on whilst still talking on her cell phone[/li][li]The woman in the post office today who jumped the line and went from station to station asking the same ridiculous question and receiving the same answer every single time[/li][li]The guy in the mall today that had those stupid wheel shoes on (A Grown Man!) and had some flying flashing light toy thing that we was trying to sell that flew it in my direction and would not take no for an answer. Fuck off asshole worked[/li][/ol]
General day to day stuff includes those wheeled shoes - why??? Straight brimmed baseball caps I want to rip off the persons head and bend it for them. Lack of manners - a simple please and thankyou goes a long way. Not following simple instructions - Gah!
There is more much more but thinking about this is bringing back the ball of fury in my stomach that I get when I am irrationally mad
I didn’t eat many meals with my family growing up – this is fairly common in restaurant families. I know that most people enjoy dining in groups, and expect others to join in the experience. I know that most of them mean well when they invite me to partake.
What I can’t understand is the coercive streak that comes out in some people when you tell them you’d rather not “try some of this – no, just a taste – *Aw, come on – *c’mon, c’mon…”
What kind of jerk insists you ignore medical problems to go along with the group? Do they spike the water of recovering alcoholics? “Hey, what’s with those needles? Do you see anybody else doing that? Insulin, schminsulin, here, have a cookie…”
Gee, I was worried that my anger wasn’t irrational enough for this thread, and here I am on the last train for bananasville.
Another thing that bugs me - team-building “social events” at work, which are followed shortly by reorganizations. My team has been reorganized four times in the past two years - twice while I was on maternity leave and twice since this summer. Only once has this had any effect on me. I hate, hate hate these mandatory “team” meetings where they drag us all in there only to tell us that some guy we’ll never run into - and who we’ll only meet during the initial rah-rah stages of his employment - has just been hired as senior vp of our group.
We then have to meet him personally, have drinks and network with him to kiss his ass in the event that we just might get a promotion at some nebulous, undefined point down the line. I like to play the game as much as anyone, but only if there’s a chance in hell I’ll win.
OMG OMG OMG. That sound makes me want to crawl right out of my skin. I was recently listening to an NPR program, and the guest made those horrible sounds, and it made me squirm every time I heard it, but the guy’s story was so flipping interesting I didn’t want to miss it, but I’m shooting thought waves at the radio, “YOU COULDN’T GET THE GUY A GLASS OF WATER???” Gaaahhhh.
Related, eating sounds drive me bananas. My husband, unfortunately, is a really loud eater due to an old jaw fracture, so I know he can’t help it, but Jesus God, do I want to take his fucking plate away sometimes.
My personal bugbear is when I ask somebody a question and they don’t reply within a short period. But there are caveats.
If I can tell that they have heard me and are considering their response, then a delay is fine. If they look as though they didn’t hear me, or are just drifting along inside their head then it makes me irrationally mad, just for a moment.
I don’t know if this signals some huge, controlled latent rage a la Ned Flanders or whether it’s just one of those things. In most circumstances I’m the most relaxed person you would ever meet. Just not if you don’t answer my gosh darn question!
It was frustrating for me, too (although only rising to the level of “rationally mad”,) when I was in a group that played Settlers of Catan every week, and there was a player who, when it was his turn, would sit with an inscrutable look on his face for several minutes, and we couldn’t tell if he was thinking about his turn or had zoned out. One player, though got even more mad at him than I did and would tell him to hurry up several times a night (and the rest of us, too, but not as often as the slow player.)
I found out later that the slow player in question wasn’t really as annoyingly imponderably slow at playing as he seemed, but was doing it to egg on the person who always asked him to hurry up, adding more time each time the person brought it to his attention, so it turns out many times he really wasn’t contemplating his move :mad: