I hate easing noises as well . . . grrrr, the way my dad drinks rasam . . . gulpgulpsmackgulp . . . fortheloveofGODITSAFUCKINGLIQUIDNOTPUDDING . . . GRRRRRRRR
Loud breathers. People who sigh in the restroom.
People who take too friggin long in the restroom. Really. I dunno why this pisses me off, but if I’m in a stall and the person in the stall next to me just seems to be there, not doing anything, not making any sounds . . . stopitalreadyandleavesoicanshitinpeace
PEOPLE WHO CLICK. Particularly in class. Particularly during tests. Particularly while also loud breathing. Seriously; it’s either their pen or a sound in their throat or biting their fingernails or whatever but they click and I die inside. DURING FUCKING TESTS. When my nerves are already frayed. My irritated mind fantasizes somehow that this clicking allows them to detract points from me which are added to their score . . .
This is seriously unfair, but I’m a very nervous driver, and whenever I’m about to perform a particularly difficult manuever, like making a tight turn, it irritates me to no end when I see another car pull. up. right. then. Like, they did it just to piss me off, and they couldn’t have waited another 30 seconds. I know, I know, not their fault, but still.
People who make sounds when the making of sounds is generally not necessary, like while standing in an elevator.
People who chew loudly, or sigh heavily after every fucking sip of some drink . . . whoopdyfuckingdo, I fucking get it, it’s tasty, get over it already.
I have my pen. I like my pen. I’m not OCD, nor am I a germophobe. But I don’t like other people using my pen, especially customers.
I know that someone spying a pen on a counter will pick it up and use it. Perfectly OK! That’s what a pen is for, to use! And there should be a pen on a counter!
Only…it’s my pen. You, the customer, didn’t know that. You needed a pen, saw one, and used it. You didn’t know that I accidentally left it in your reach, and realized the grievous error only too late. You didn’t see how my eyes wistfully tracked the pen back and forth across the paper, hoping somehow you would magically sense that it was not a pen for you.
I like my pen. Too many customers have absconded with this pen, intuiting that it was a beloved pen, a prized plum to be savoured again and again, precious ink flowing sinuously out in the most perfect manner. A pen that wrote the words for me, a pen that was as much a part of me as my hands are.
And now, now the pen is returned to me. The difference is infinitesimal, yet also massive. How can I ever be sure of the pen’s loyalty again? It was in the hands of another! How can I ever feel the same way about my pen again?
Um. Whoa. It’s a pen, Lionne. Perhaps you could keep it in your pocket, out of sight?
I am irrationally angry at me–I saw the ornament; I thought–that might fall right off this tree and break. But did I move it? Did I take it down? Nooooooo. And now #2 son’s handblown glass dragonfly ornament is in 3 pieces. How to fix? :smack: :mad:
Door slamming drives me insane. I know lots of people slam doors when they’re angry, but I’m talking about people who can’t close a door without slamming it.
When my wife leaves the house, she slams the door so hard that the entire building shakes, pictures rattle on the walls, etc. She swears that she isn’t aware that she does it, and asking her to stop yields only temporary improvement (the thunderous slamming returns after a few days).
I also worked across the hall from a colleague who loudly slammed her office door four or five times a day. No reason, that’s just how she closed her door. I would jump about a foot out of my ergonomic chair each time. On one occasion she stormed back to her office after a contentious meeting and REALLY slammed the door – I thought the building might collapse.
And that’s the one thing I hate about staying in hotels … the endless slam, slam, slam, slam that echoes up and down those long corridors.
I thought it might be that, but then the thread is stuff that makes one irrational and I thought…well, here we have a winner!
Thing that makes my Dad irrationally mad: daylight saving time. He refuses to change his clocks. God knows what my mother does (he did not do this when I as a child, but then again, he left when I was 8, divorced her when I was 14 and remarried my mother when I was 21, so who knows what he did…)
When I hit my head or stub my toe. I don’t know why. Neither is usually particularly painful but I get so angry that I have to sit down and just breathe for a minute or two. I also feel really bad because if some well-meaning person asks if I need anything, I usually snap at them and say really rude things. I don’t know why I have this reaction and I wish I didn’t.
Just the opposite for me. I can’t stand the baseball caps that have the brims so ridiculously overshaped that it looks like they have a toilet paper tube sprouting from their forehead. It makes me want to rip it off their head and throw the hat to ground, stomping and jumping on it, yelling “I flatten thee in the name of all that is flat. Flat you! Flat you!”
Flat brims were good enough for my granddad’s John Deere cap, kept the driving rain off your forehead and blocked the hot summer sun at the same time (why yes, in those days they got extreme weather of both kinds simultaneously, and they were thankful for it!)
This is why we have the “Grunt of Acknowledgement” in my house. I have a very quiet voice, and I WILL repeat myself every time my question/statement is not acknowledged; I’ll just assume I wasn’t heard. The Grunt of Acknowledgement saves everyone trouble.
Ludovic, your friend sounds like a dick. Lionne, I understand the love of a good pen. One that writes smoothly and without blotting, every time, and feels good in your hand; heaven.
And then there are the people who want to try some of your food. I understand that, especially with more traditional Chinese dining, it’s expected that food will be shared amongst the group. However, my very American, Italian-heritage inlaws get like this when we go out to eat at a Chinese place. They order a ton of different entrees and then start holding out their hands to accept my entree. Guys, I’m a vegetarian. I’ve only been married into this family for a decade now, I admit that may not have been enough time for you to remember that. So no, you may not take my food, since I can’t eat yours. No, ma po tofu does not count, it has pork in it. Same with those green beans.
I also wanted to smack the hand of a sister-in-law who was in my kitchen during Thanksgiving. I had made some oven-roasted parmesan-and-bacon sweet potatoes and put them in a bowl; the roasting pan had a few potato quarters without bacon. She snagged a potato off the pan when I wasn’t looking, and started eating it on her way out to the dining room table where there were plenty of them that she could eat, but those were mine! I didn’t tell her beforehand because I didn’t expect that someone would do that.
Going back to a popular theme, loud sneezers. My sneezes tend to be forceful (to the point where sometimes my chest will hurt afterwards), but they are not loud. Stop freaking yelling while you sneeze, because that’s what you’re doing.
Just thought of another one: I hate listening to people walk when they drag their feet. The woman who works in the cube behind me walks like this. scuff, scuff, scuff It’s how I know she’s about to come over and interrupt me to ask me how to use her Internet Explorer or to complain about her boss. At least lift your damn feet! Grrr…
I absolutely must know what kind of pen you use. I am on a never ending search for The Perfect Pen. The Paper Mate 1.0 mm is one of my top picks so far. Good dark ink and consistent flow are a plus, but the pen is just a shade too thin for me.
Dante, the papermate is my favorite, too. I order a box for myself and give everyone else the cheaper clicky pens.
My husband chews his fingers and it drives me mad. It’s disgusting on so many levels. I guess it’s not entirely irrational anger, since he does touch me with those same fingers and it’s GROSS, but they are his fingers and he can do whatever he wants with them. Sometimes I slap his hand away from his mouth before I can stop myself, and that always leads to a nice big fight.
I have a serious, probably life-threatening anger management problem that I’ve just started to work on getting treated through therapy and a support group. EVERYTHING makes me fist-clenchingly, violently angry.
But the one thing that really stands head-and-shoulders above most other things is when people won’t wait their turn or do what they’re supposed to do in a chaotic situation. It makes me absolutely apoplectic with rage. For example, if there are long lines at a store and a new register opens up, I’ve almost gotten into fist fights over people rushing over to jump in line rather than allowing the next “rightful” person already in the line to move over to the newly-opened register. The traffic equivalent of this - people driving on medians or shoulders instead of patiently waiting like adults for their lanes, exits, or turns to open up - instills so much road rage in me that I’m honestly surprised I haven’t rammed someone with my car yet. There’s a place where I have to make a left turn every day where the turn lane appears in a curve, and I’m almost in a head-on every single day because some asshole is driving on MY side of the road to get around the curve rather than waiting like an adult for traffic to move.
My wife does that or more importantly did that because I have done some pretty serious interventions throughout the years that have had good success. However, the unanswered question was the mild one. She would regularly start a question or a sentence and then have no idea about she wants to say.
"I have something great to tell you…ummmm…ummm…theeeee… theeeerrre…ummmm…what did I want to say? ummmmm…ummmm…this guy…ummmm. It was great ummmm…at work…this…ummm…I wondered…never mind…I lost me train of thought…let me think…ummm. It will come back to me…oh yeah…do you think that…oh, this guy…it was weird…
During this time I would be staring her in the face. The first thing I tried was to say “Come on child, speak”. Over hundreds of instances of this, I would clap loudly twice straight to her face and then say I am interested in what say has to say and repeat with the hand clapping to get her out of her own head and into a real conversational mode of thought. The third option was to just sit there and probe for her great piece of information and never let down. Repeat until she comes up with something substantial. That seemed to work and she doesn’t do it anymore.
The other one I have is walking groups that simply lose momentum over time. It happens mostly with women but all kinds of people are prone to the disorder. You can be walking en route to a restaurant 3 blocks away and the people will simply lose momentum and stop for no particular reason. It is usually because of a conversation someone is having and we all know that no one can talk and walk at the same time so the group just follows the lowest common denominator and the others either stop completely or merely gets passed to an escaped Alzheimer’s patient with a cane from the discount rack. I would have killed for a buggy whip many times for that problem.
That’s another one - my family are all multi-taskers, and we commonly talk and work, without the work slowing down in the slightest. I’ve noticed other people gradually come to a complete stop while talking, half-peeled potato still held in their hands. Come on people, work and talk! It’s not rocket surgery!
I’m not being condescending at all - I’m really, really glad you’re working on that and getting some help. It must suck to go through life like that.
Something else that drives me up a wall besides the BF’s amazing snoring is when he shifts on over to my side of the bed and there’s an elbow. The man is unmoveable when he’s asleep and it drives me crazy when his nasty overgrown toenail ends up in my leg and his elbows in my ribcage.
