Do you have a teeny, tiny, silly thing that ticks you off WAY more than it should? Post it here! Seriously, if you told someone about it and their response would be anything other than, “That really bothers you?” than it is not insignificant enough for this thead. And it should be silly! Sillyness is the key here.
My strange issue is elevator buttons. If I walk up to a bank of elevators and push the button it lights up to indicate to me that it knows I need the elevator. If someone comes up after me and pushes the button again even though it is already lit up I stand there perfectly politely but it sends my brain into a tizzy of, “Why the hell did you push the button again? What, you think I am too dumb to figure out how the buttons work? You’re an idiot! I KEEL YOU! froths” Logically I know they are just pushing the button because that is what you do when you get to the elevator and most people are just on auto pilot so they push the button like normal, but it still sends my brain into a mini-rage. Then I think about how dumb it is to get upset over button pushing and I laugh to myself inside my head at my own sillyness.
When people pose the thing you just said as a question.
“…back when I was in the Army.”
“You were in the Army?”
“No. The words, ‘Back when I was in the Army’ are used to mean, ‘when I was playing womens volleyball.’ There’s simply no way those words could be construed to mean that I was in the Army at one point.”
I can’t watch a half-hour local news broadcast without rolling my eyes at the idiocy about 800 times. There are many reasons for this, but I’ll just mention one:
In almost every single goddamn story, there comes the point where they say “for no reason whatsoever, we now take you to some random idiot we found on the street, who is going to say something completely obvious, adding nothing at all to this story.”
Please, local news organizations, hear me! For the love of god, can we please knock this silliness off? Wouldn’t it be better to fit several more stories into your 22 minutes than to waste time like this?
Although I don’t have a car any more and couldn’t do anything about this when I did, but I get livid when I see someone park in a asinine or selfish way, i.e., parking exactly in the middle of what could be two parking spots, or parking too far forward (or back) while other cars are “off,” without realizing if they moved a lilttle bit in one direction, adjustments corrections can be made by later drivers to get the maximum number of spaces. Drives me bananas. I don’t need the spot and, like I said, I can’t do anything about it, but there you have it.
Also, the building I live in has an iron gate for an outer door, a small vestibule with mailboxes and then a locked inner door. I see red when someone leaves the inner door not quite closed so it’s unlocked. There’s an iron gate (that’s usually locked), so why am I coming unhinged over one little door being left open?
Lest this deteriorate into a parking / driving complaint thread…
In a grocery store parking lot, people who pull up to the front door and sit and wait right under the “No Parking - Fire Zone” sign, while their buddy / girlfriend runs in for just a minute to pick up their paycheck or just grab one or two things, it’ll only take a minute, really! While the driver sits there with what I can only describe as a sheepishly defiant look on their face. They know they are in the wrong, but dammit they’re a rebel and they don’t need no stinkin’ signs telling them where to put their car, f*ck yeah, (but I hope no one is looking at me)!
Moms who bring their gigantic “travel system” strollers into the preschool at dropoff/pickup time for an older sibling. Dude, you can’t pick the baby up and carry it 25 feet from the parking lot to the preschool? Doesn’t it actually take MORE time and hassle to get the gigantic stroller out, assemble it, put the baby in it, and wheel it inside? And then once you’re inside, you’re blocking half the hallway. Even seeing these things makes me insane with rage these days. Totally ridiculous, I know.
Excessive speeders make me insanely outraged. My definition of ‘‘excessive’’ is 10+ mph over the legal limit (if everyone else is going that fast I don’t tend to mind, but when you’re obviously going faster than everyone else it makes me want to shoot a rocket launcher from my car and explode you.)
I’m not one of those slowpokes who hangs out in the fast lane. But rest assured from my appropriate speed in the right lane I’m glaring at you with disdain while you zoom ahead of everyone else.
The entire time I worked for a grocery store was a littany of these little annoyances:
-people who go right down the middle of the aisles, so that no one else can past them.
-more than 10 items in the express lane. (that is, when it wasn’t an inconvienance to others. That’s not insignificant)
That kinds of makes me nuts, too. Although I think it bothers me even more when it’s at the pediatrician’s office because the office is so darn small. Exceptions if the kid is asleep, though, especially if it’s a newborn or sick.
I hate when newscasters use the word “unprecedented.” For everything, especially when it is, in fact, precedented but they used the word wrong.
Hmmmm… What else? There are tons of little things that drive me nuts, like people slumped over their shopping carts like it’s holding them up while meandering slowly down the center of the supermarket aisle, people cutting their nails at work (I get a hangnail, but all of them??). Oh, and then there was the asshole that was behind me at the yield sign today and, since I had the gall to yield, he pulled up next to me, then shot on past and pulled in front of me, almost hitting my car, only to be stopped by the stop light. Then he was so distracted by his cell phone at the light that I had to honk at him to move. I’m glad my kids were in the car or I’d have wasted my breath swearing at him. As it was, I had to explain to my son why I had honked at him twice.
As a computer professional, I sometimes have to sit at someone’s computer to troubleshoot a problem or fix something. Sometimes, I find myself sitting at a woman’s desk (let’s call her “Sally”). As a bearded man, I usually don’t look anything like the woman who normally sits there.
I hate, Hate, HATE it when some idiot walks by and says, “Sally … you’ve changed!”
I think this is a legitimate thing to get pissed off about, and so I could argue that it doesn’t even belong in this thread. I think these giant strollers are the ultimate in selfishness–my baby is so important that it needs a device that takes up the same amount of space as two obese people.
Something that enrages me for absolutely no reason is this woman on the train I ride every morning. She sits in a car that’s near the front of the train, and the doors to this car don’t open at our stop because the platform isn’t long enough. (That is, you have to walk to a car that’s farther back in order to exit at that stop.) The thing that angers me is that she starts walking back before we even get to the stop that comes before our stop. She’s in such a hurry to be the first one out of the train that she has to head toward the back of the train a full three minutes before we arrive at our stop.
Along those same lines, it drives me really, really, really nuts when someone thinks it’s necessary to state “Knock knock” every time they come to my cube or office. It was annoying the first time it happened; it certainly hasn’t gotten less annoying in the last 500 times it’s happened.
Old men in grocery stores, walking along, whistling and jingling change in their pockets. The sound is so infuriatingly annoying that I will quickly walk away lest I attack them.
I hate it when strangers use my name. I hate it when strangers are casual and use my first name, because it’s way too intimate. I hate it when they’re formal and use my last name, because it’s always mispronounced and the stranger makes a judgment call about whether to say Miss or Ms. or Mrs. and inevitably they’re wrong and/or insulting.
This is especially silly since my job often requires me to wear a name tag, hand out business cards and talk with a large amount of strangers. I argued about getting a name plaque outside my office for over a year. I came back from vacation and discovered they had put it up in my absence.
