I love these plastic bags from a certain supermarket. I probably pay a tiny bit more just for those bags as opposed to the horrible wal-mart ones. They are so durable and fit perfectly into my small bin that I’ve actually asked for some extras from the driver (I tipped them both for doing it). I’ve never spent money on garbage bags.
About grocery stores. They’re charging like $0.10/bag now. So you bring your own or you pony up for the flimsy, useless plastic ones that AREN’T from Target. Or…you buck the system and have them just stick all your stuff in another cart as they ring it up, and then you unload the cart into the trunk of your car. Sure it’s a little inconvenient when I get home, but I WIN! And I don’t do the self-check at the store, either. They ain’t paying me, and I don’t want to steal anyone’s work, so I’ll wait in the only line they have open even if there’s a handful of unused self-check stalls open. Costs me another 20-30 minutes sometimes, but I WIN!
I’m going to be realizing just how many weird quirks I have for the rest of the week. There’s no way I can even scratch the surface here. Let’s see:
Although I think the perfect temperature for a room is just around 75 degrees, I perceive a room that’s been heated to that temperature to be uncomfortably hot and one that’s been cooled to it to be freezing cold. I feel that way regardless of what I’m wearing.
I’m so averse to going out and doing errands that even though I’m retired and have all the time in the world, I feel cheated of an entire day if I have to go out somewhere, no matter how short a trip.
I really like to cook food in bulk and freeze it. Make lasagna and freeze single servings? I’m on it! Make one for my family to eat tonight? Ugh.
I generally don’t have OCD, but if I am playing Scrabble with Mrs. Geek and she places an I upside down, I have to rotate it so that it is right-side up.
I am fairly anti-social. I hate crowds. I hate large parties. However, I have no problem speaking or performing in front of a large crowd. I don’t get stage fright at all.
I don’t like talking on the phone.
I don’t think I have all that great of a memory, but people often tell me I do. My quirk though is that I often blank on names. I recognize people easily by their face, and I can tell you all kinds of things about that person right off the top of my head… except their name.
I hate traffic. I will gladly drive 15 minutes out of my way to avoid 5 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
That’s actually normal. The human nervous system is good at detecting changes in temperature, but rather poor at determining the absolute temperature. If you want to have some fun, fill up one pot with hot water (not so hot that you burn yourself) and one with cold water. Put one hand in the hot pot and the other in the cold pot and wait long enough for them to both become acclimated. Then put both hands in a pot of water that is halfway in temperature between the other two. One hand will feel the water as warm and the other will feel it as cool even though it’s the same temperature for both hands.
I hate those phone systems that require you to speak what you need to do. “I’ve got a problem with my account”. “I need to upgrade service”. Or whatever. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel like a complete idiot, having a staccato, one-sided conversation with a machine. I basically refuse to use them. If it says “if you want to do x, say yes” I’ll press 1, which works 99.9 percent of the time.
I’m not a technophobe by any means. I work in IT for a living and I use a computer 9-10 hours a day. But those systems just Do Not Work well.
I read the Straight Dope.
The same supermarket had 50-100 cashiers 20 years ago. And they’re all out of jobs because of AI, and yes, the customer is doing the work. They have one register open, and then one employee who is there in case a customer/worker has a problem.
I know people who have the same bags I get for free as part of their budget, and I remember thinking how I’ve saved THOUSANDS of dollars by just using whatever I had. I even use pill jars to hold screws, bolts, nails, etc.
For an American, I am very weird. I don’t participate in American culture as most people define it. I don’t watch television, I use the modern technology that I am forced to (basically, a smart phone, which I got six years ago, and this laptop); in my kitchen my small appliances consist of a two-slice 1940’s toaster. Last year I got a microwave for the first time in my life. It’s useful.
I follow the news, but know nothing about celebrities, popular music, sports, modern slang, and many other such (to me) pointless categories. I eat in restaurants a few times a year for special occasions. I have been to chain and fast-food restaurants a handful of times in my life, always because there was no other way to get something to eat. My kitchen is full of raw materials like dry beans and grains and flour, local produce, local dairy products. Pretty much nothing pre-made.
I re-use and repair everything it’s possible for. I mend my clothes and darn my socks. I cut my husband’s hair (I can’t cut my own). Between my husband and I, we build, tend, and create almost everything around here.
That’s all very atypical. Although around here (rural New England, which has a lot of aging back-to-the-lander hippies) there’s a lot more people like me than I’ve ever been around since the 1970’s.
Whenever I pass through an automatic door, just before it opens I do this little semicircular motion with my hand, two fingers extended, as if I’m opening it with the Force. It’s reached the point where I barely notice myself doing it.
I’ve posted my quirks so many times I feel you guys must know them already, but I don’t feel like starting to work yet, so:
I won’t eat food if I feel it’s the wrong color. Mostly that means unnatural food colorings, but it also includes blueberries. I was jokingly telling my grandson the other day that all the best foods are white and brown, so he challenged me to name 19 brown foods. Well, that was easy. And dung was not one of them!
I refuse to hear Free Bird by Lynyrd Sknyrd and will take drastic measures to escape it if it plays in my presence.
Comfy clothes. I’m generally wearing pajamas within 90 seconds of opening the front door when returning home from work.
I obsessively crop out photos of things I don’t like. Many of the photos in my desktop background have been carefully cropped/scrubbed of people I don’t like, things I don’t like, etc - and I’ve got over 14,000.
When I was 13, I also used to keep spiders in the mosquito netting over my bed (the mosquitoes were able to get through the netting anyway, so I caught four or five spiders and brought them into the bed-net with me - the idea being that they’d serve as goalkeepers to catch any mosquitoes that made it through the net.) They never did catch any, but served as…“company.” I would sleep soundly at night with these spiders just two or three feet above my head. Not something I’d do today.
Thanks to OCD, I have a phenomenal memory for keeping track of which surfaces have been “contaminated” and by what - even remembering clearly 5 years later.
Thread winner and QED
I have a few quirks. My gf has asked me to give one up and I have. I used to always have people approach me at parties/bars/concerts absolutely sure they knew me. Apparently my appearance is common. Anytime anyone kept it up, I’d assume my prison yard glare and ask them in a deep, quiet voice if they’ve ever done time. It really freaked people out, but hey, it was just a joke. I haven’t done it in a few years.
Quirk #2. I wear old work shirts with random names over the pocket. Decades ago I was helping a friend with t-shirts screen-printed with his bar logo. Blank shirts were expensive, the printing added to cost.
I found a uniform supply company selling used shirts for $1.25 a shirt. I got it down to .95 cents a shirt for bundles of a dozen. I got the price down a bit more by buying a gross at a time. (The company was one that supplied shirts for a business’s employees with their names. They laundered shirts weekly, etc. When the person quit, the company had their shirts).
I went through each gross of shirts and pulled out any that I liked in my size. Some had my IRL name, others had goofy names, still others had names I just liked.
I still have 30 or so of these shirts. I wear them in place of t-shirts. When people call me by the name on the shirt and I don’t respond and they say the name again, I’ll say, no, I’m Real Name. “But your shirt says Issac”? I then explain that people wear shirts that say “Gretzky” even though that isn’t their name and act puzzled that they don’t get it.
I saw this shortly after reading your post.
I live about a mile from the dog park, and I walk my black lab Nash there about every day. Along the way, he’ll get these spurts of excitement and loop around me. I count out loud the loop number when he does this. He usually averages about 15 loops, and his high is 30.
I’ve had to refine the definition of a “loop” a few times. If he stops and waits for me to catch up then does the loop, that doesn’t count. It’s only half a loop. If however, he starts the loop before I catch up with him, I count it. I figured it’s between a half attempt and a full attempt, so it’s good enough.
He also has “hot areas” where he’s more likely to loop. We go down a street, then turn right. Sometimes he’ll get in a loop or two before we round the corner. He’ll then hold off till we get to the end of the street, where there’s a circle. He’ll loop a few times before we get to the circle, then he’ll go nuts until we leave the circle and cross over to the main park. In addition to the dog park, there are tennis courts, an aquatic center, a gym and several softball fields. We cross behind the gym before getting to the dog park, and he usually gets several more loops in as we make the home stretch.
I’ve seriously considered looking for an app where I can record the number of times he loops, and in which area he made the loop. Maybe there’s a pattern in there that answers the mysteries of the universe.
I might have been smug at one time (I’ve been without a television since 1976 so I’ve had a long period to reflect) but it now it is much more obviously a kind of sensory intolerance. Television is alarmingly abrasive when I catch glimpses of it. I’m the same way about loud motors, chemicals and fumes, crowds, almost anything that most people find exciting and stimulating. Feels like I have no skin. I mean I can’t bear mint toothpaste because it feels like it burns the mucus membranes in my mouth. Seriously.
I sometimes say in a falsetto: “thank you, door!”
I bought a pair of footy pajamas a few months ago, and my impression was, where have you been all my life? While it was still cool out, I’d put them on first thing, and they stay on until I need to leave the house. They are unbelievably comfortable, with no restriction anywhere. The only negative thing about them is their goofy look.
And when you’re chillin’ at yer crib who cares how they look?