One that shouldn’t be so annoying is the clever ads that YouTube content providers embed in their content.
So if I’m watching a video about “manufacturing widgets” and then the guy’s sentences start sounding stilted for some reason, then he says “You know, manufacturing widgets is hard, but you what can be harder? Selling those widgets, and to do that you need an online store…”
then smoothly segues into an ad for some build-your-own-website stuff.
Or “You know, this process of manufacturing widgets can get complicated, and one thing that you need in order to design a good widget is solid foundation in math. You know where I went when I wanted to improve my math skills?”
I totally understand why they do it. But it frustrates me that I pay YouTube to not have ads (different revenue stream, I know), and I still see them. And the oh-so-clever segues. Argh!
But I can just skip past them, so why do they bother me so?
If my mother had learned that I was calling a teacher by his first name, I would have been in SUCH trouble. The fact that the teacher asked me to do it would have made no difference. Sorry, if you were my teacher, you would have been Mr. Gabriel. It wouldn’t have been worth the aggravation.
Well, I would never have done it back in the Dark Ages when I was an undergraduate. But I’m an adjunct now, and it’s common (though not a rule) within my department for profs to be called by their first names. I’m fine with my first name, I’m fine with Professor Lastname; whatever the student is comfortable with is okay by me.
Which did lead to a rather amusing juxtaposition one day when I collected the papers due for a class (before submitting papers online was the standard way of doing things):
Student 1 headed his paper with the date, the name of the course, and “Dr. Unwashed.” [I do not have a doctorate.]
Student 2 headed his paper with the date, the name of the course, and “Ulf.”
Well, college is different, of course. I did have a few professors, though certainly not all, that I was on a first-name basis with.
Different strokes indeed. I had a classics professor named, let’s say, David Robinson (not his real last name, but the “David” is accurate). A friend of mine turned in a blue book once with “Dave Robinson” on the Professor’s Name line.
It came back with the name circled, and printed in big red letters: “Nobody, least of all you, young man, calls me Dave.”
This is a really minor thing that bugs me unnecessarily.
I use git, a source code control system, to manage a lot of my software. You can connect your local code to a server like github. Git has two commands, “push”, which uploads any changes you’ve made on your local computer to the server, and “pull”, which downloads any changes on the server to your local computer.
If you try to pull, but you already have all the changes that are on the server, git prints the message:
Already up to date.
If you try to push, but the server already has all the changes that are on your local computer, git prints the message:
Everything up-to-date
Those hyphens bug me every time I see them. “up to date” is not a compound word, it’s three separate words. And even if there were some reason to write it that way, why aren’t the two messages consistent?
The hyphens would be correct for an attributive adjective (an up-to-date computer), just not a predicate adjective (the computer is up to date). I think the latter is a phrase but the former is a compound.
Hyphens are next to apostrophes in the list of punctuation people just can’t manage.
I have always drunk my coffee black with no sugar and it rubs me the wrong way when others add cream and/or sugar to their coffee. It’s as if I’m convinced that drinking coffee is some sort of sophisticated activity and the milk/sugar people are just posers faking their way through drinking coffee to seem worldly, or something. Just the option of creamers and sugar packets being available bothers me on some level. None of it makes any sense. And then the real kicker is that on rare occasions when I have iced coffee I load it up with a shit-ton of cream and sugar myself.
I have a complicated relationship with coffee; this is just scratching the surface. Maybe my brain is broken.
The discussion about calling people by their first names reminded me, it kind of rubbed me the wrong way back in 2016 when people on social media were calling the two candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination “Hillary” and “Bernie”.
Sorry for the double post, but while watching TV last night I thought of another one – ads that are very thinly disguised as “informational” segments. For example, those Brand Power ads that have been around for decades, and a newer one I’ve just started noticing, MediFacts (which despite the name, seems to push cosmetic products rather than actual medicines). I’m not sure why they bother me; I’m sure everyone can tell they’re just advertisements. Maybe that’s actually why; I’m thinking “Who do they think they’re fooling?”
Lightly paraphrased conversation with the nurse while waiting for the cardiologist:
Nurse: How have you been feeling lately, young man?
Me: pretty well actually.
Nurse: any changes in your medication young man?
Me: nope.
Nurse: any unusual symptoms young man?
Me: no…
Nurse: any slips or falls young man?
Me: no…
Nurse: How old are you?
Me: 49.
Nurse: Oh, I’m so sorry, just forget I asked that last question about falling.
Me: …
Nurse: Young man.
Zippers on suitcases and such. 9 times out of 10 there are two that you can meet somewhere in the middle. That’s how I do it. And think that’s the intent of the two zippers.
My wife will just use one zipper. Leave one at it’s ‘starting’ place, and zip the other alllll the wayyy abound, instead of meeting in the middle or there abouts.
My husband would do that on backpacks etc. I asked him why, and he pointed out that sometimes zippers will work their way open, a little or the whole way. Much less likely to do so if you do one zipper the whole way around, as your wife does.
Still annoys me though. I’ve wasted whole minutes of my life (in total, not on any single occasion) trying to find where the zipper pulls are on a bag.
A mention of coffee upstream reminded me of a silly pet peeve of mine.
When I go to a Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts with the intent of ordering coffee and a prepared sandwich–in these places the counter workers prepare coffee and a separate person prepares sandwiches in a queue that is often backed up.
As soon as I walk up to the counter and say the first part of the order, some workers will instantly turn around and start working on the coffee–
In my mind I imagine fifteen drive-through orders coming in and getting in front of my sandwich order in the “sandwich queue” as I wait for my coffee to be prepared very slowly and the worker to say “Anything else?”
But, I have no idea how their sandwich queue works, and the worst case is that one order would sneak in ahead of mine–big deal. But it annoys me that if I tried to explain it, a busy worker probably would hear half of my sentence and move on.
So I try to avoid this by remembering to say “I’d like a bagel with blah blah…” as the first thing out of my mouth, then the coffee.
Even then, they jump into making the coffee, leaving the transaction open on the register, again making me worry that the sandwich order doesn’t go in until it is paid…maybe?
Boy I wish I could just get over it and not think about what order my sandwich is prepared in.
I remember a few years ago, when we still had dead tree newspapers delivered, that someone wrote a letter to both of our newspapers (and who knows how many others that we didn’t subscribe to) to complain about people pronouncing “bruschetta” the wrong way. I don’t know what surprised me more, that someone would actually write to more than one newspaper about something that trivial, or that the newspapers would actually print it.
