Like for example, how someone thinks because you work in IT you can fix their TV, or how if you’re into music you must be able to play any random instrument.
I’m a lawyer. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard “oh you’re a lawyer? You must have been good at arguing when you were a kid”…or that I must be “good at public speaking”.
It’s funny cause I do commercial real estate contracts and business law…I don’t ever go to court. Most of my day is spent staring at a computer and trying to figure out the best way to change three or four words in an obscure contract provision to best protect my client’s monetary interests. I don’t really ever argue in a professional setting, but I have learned how to think differently, how to see things from various perspectives and anticipate all sides of a negotiation and how I’d best respond.
I also can’t stand all the constant “hey can I ask you a legal question” from friends and family. Or friends and family sending me random contracts and asking me to “look it over for them”. It’s like they assume that just because they know me, I can do that for free, when I spend 10-12 hours a day billing large commercial clients for that same type of work.
That leads me to my next pet peeve: people in my life assuming that my “office job” is a simple nine to five. No. I represent clients all over the world so sometimes I am up at 4:30am to get on an international call at 5:00an. Sometimes I’m working late into the night to finalize a big land purchase contract or commercial office lease; sometimes doing that after putting in a full 9 hours at the office. I don’t get paid time off; I can work at my own pace, sure, and take “days off” here and there, but the work and business and the need for legal advice is constant and I have to catch up somehow, sometime whenever I take “time off”.
I know I’m in a privileged position so I feel kind of shitty about complaining about this, but it gets pretty old. I also recognize that I definitely need to figure out a better way to improve my work/life balance…because this won’t be super sustainable for much longer.
I’m an avid cyclist (commuting and recreational) and in both cases I am a vehicular cyclist, that is, I do follow the local traffic laws when I’m on a bike and I am extremely comfortable riding in traffic. I used to instruct vehicular cycling for the Canadian Cycling Association (CCA) and have been riding this way since the early '90s and I have seen numerous statistics associated with cycling safety.
Things drive me up the wall:
- the perception that cycling in traffic is dangerous (it’s not - it’s cycling dangerously in traffic that’s dangerous)
- statements like “you must love living in Whatever-ville because of all the bike lanes”. I live in Montreal and I avoid any down-town streets that have bike lanes.
- Miles/km of bike lanes are a great metric for “bike-friendly cities”. (it’s not a great metric, it’s just a number used by lazy, unknowledgeable policy makers)
I’m in IT. I’m a web developer now, but I used to work as a sysadmin at a previous job. One thing that’s always struck me is that my co-workers who aren’t techy have no conception of how simple or difficult tech-related things are.
Sometimes this worked in my favor, when they’d call me a genius for fixing their computer when I didn’t do much more than say, reinstall a corrupted driver and reboot.
Other times I’d be asked to build a 20 page website with a massive amount of data…“hey, and can you get that by the end of the week?”
When I tell people about what I saw through my telescope, and they say they think astrology is so interesting!
I work in advertising. The big ones:
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“Advertising doesn’t work. I’ve never bought something because I saw an ad for it.”
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“Advertising people are evil; they try to force you to buy something that you don’t want.”
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“Advertising uses subliminal images and sounds to play mind games with you, to force you to buy things you don’t want.”
It’s more eye-rolling than being driven up the wall, but:
On a professional basis, there’s the idea that the American Medical Association is an all-powerful group that dictates physician behavior and practice. The truth is that the A.M.A. has no power whatsoever to discipline or dictate to docs in any way. It makes suggestions for practice guidelines, but specialist societies and guidelines established through competent research have more influence. The A.M.A. is essentially a lobby group whose membership has been diminishing for quite awhile.
An accompanying delusion is that the A.M.A. is an organization that backs far-right ideology. Actually, it’s shifted markedly to the left in recent years. Practically every issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association has one or more articles discussing ways to combat systemic racism or sexism in medicine, promoting gender-affirming care and so on (whether the A.M.A. membership overall approves of these positions is another matter).
In terms of gardening, a significant irritant is the concept that success is dependent on having a “green thumb” - a mystical ability denied to others. No, there’s no “green thumb”. If you take the trouble to learn what plants need to grow well and make the effort to apply that knowledge, you’ll get good results.
That we push one button and the autopilot takes care of everything and we pilots don’t really fly the plane.
The use of automation in airplanes is actually quite complex. I was flying jets for years and still learning new subtleties about how to best use it. At my recurrent trainings I would occasionally hear about situations I had never considered. There are multiple modes that interact and setting them up to work properly takes some preparation and precise inputting of data. Believe me, we are flying the plane through the automation that we very carefully set up and monitor.
And unlike people in Teslas, we are quite prepared to take over if the automation should do something unexpected.
TL;DR joking around about food poisoning pisses me off to no end.
Food Poisoning.
That is, claiming you got food poisoning either as a joke (ie blaming it on Taco Bell) or making an outright accusation (ie I just ate at [place] and 10 minutes later I was puking).
First off, I’m fully aware that certain types of food poisoning can set in quite quickly. But, in general, if you get food poisoning, it’s not what you just ate, it’s what you ate yesterday or the day before.
Generally if you get sick from food at a restaurant, it’s not an isolated case. If it’s something an employee did, it’s likely that quite a few people, including the employee, will get sick, not just you. If it’s something from their supplier, a lot more people will get sick.
Also, from a legal standpoint, if you don’t have an actual diagnosis of something specific, you don’t have food poisoning. Or maybe you do, but you can’t accuse a business of making you sick if you refuse to see a doctor. Similarly, if your doctor says you have ‘food poisoning-like symptoms’, that’s not a diagnosis of food poisoning.
Anyway, I’m sure places like Taco Bell are used to this, but from time to time someone makes comment like this about a small business and it can be a problem.
A few years ago someone called up and said that they got food poisoning from us (and he had been here like an hour earlier). I got his info and suggested he see a doctor, to which he refused. I tried to explain that without an actual diagnoses of some specific type of food poisoning, there’s nothing I can do. He called back later with an ‘official diagnoses’ of the previously mentioned ‘food poisoning like symptoms’.
At this point I’m confident I’m in the clear so I told him he should report this to the local heath dept. They take this stuff rather seriously so I was sure they’d clear this up. In the mean time the health dept called me about a report they got.
Now we’ve got two people. Now we have a problem. We call our insurance agent, they start working behind the scenes to line up legal help as well as a PR person in case this is big enough that a press release becomes necessary.
He wasn’t sick, he had a tummy ache and the second person was also him (some crossed wires with when/who called the health dept).
If you think you have food poisoning, either see a doctor or call your local health department, don’t go on facebook and blast the place where you just had lunch.
I work in a medical library. People assume I know anything about the books. I really don’t. I’m just here to manage them, not read them. If you walk up and ask me where to find “the latest edition of Netter’s,” my response is probably going to be: “Of what now?”
I was an electrician long ago. People were always asking me to fix their TVs or stereo gear. My standard answer was always “I can fix it so nobody can fix it.”
As an amateur woodworker, people think you can operate a lathe or make them a new kitchen table. Worse, they want you to do it for free. I never had a problem making a charcuterie board free of labor, but when you want maple, walnut, or other expensive wood, I’m probably going to have to charge you for it if I don’t have enough scrap pieces lying around.
If you noodle around on a guitar, people think you should give a public recital. The concept of hundreds (or thousands) of hours of practice, learning a set list, etc., doesn’t seem to appear on their radar.
And no, I don’t magically know how to play that song you can’t remember the name of or who it’s by or how it goes.
Sure, no problem. So what’s the fingering for that Cmin13, off the top of your head? 
“English professor, huh? Well, I guess I’d better watch my grammar around you.”
First of all: that is not (most of) what I do; secondly, unless you are a non-native speaker, what you think is bad grammar almost certainly isn’t. It is probably colloquial speech, which is fine; it may be a dialect other than Standard American English, which is also fine. It may even be some other sort of language error, like misusing a word. But people naturally use the correct grammar for their particular dialect and register – if did not they would talking this like, nobody which do.
I attended an oyster festival in Pittsburgh a few years back. The next day I was pretty sick. Out of curiosity, I called the Pittsburgh Health Department. Once I mentioned the oyster festival, the person answering the phone switched my call to someone who was handling all the calls from us oyster eaters.
I was pretty ill for a day, but a few months later I had raw oysters.
I’m a software developer, therefore people think I am an expert on anything related to computers, from IT, to hardware, to digital cameras (they’re digital, so they’re like computers, right?).
Non really a “profession” but when I was working for Social Security I was always getting jokes about government employees who didn’t do anything but sit at their desks and goof off. While I will admit that some of my co-workers took shameless advantage of the job security they had by slacking off, I worked my butt off to see that people got the benefits they deserved. One of my proudest personal moments was when I was reviewing a record and found an error that resulted in a widow getting nearly $20,000.00 in back benefits in addition to an increase in her monthly benefits.
When I was a fleet manager, people assumed I was interested in, and knew all about cars: the latest models and their performance stats; comparative fuel consumption and whether you can get a double bed in the back.
Sure I could, if I wanted, tell you the average stats for the vehicles in our fleet, but in truth, I never found cars all that interesting. I have a reasonable understanding of how they work, but if they stop working, I call the AA or RAC.
The opening gambit I never wanted to hear in the pub was “Hey Bob. What do you think of [insert make/model here]?” Or, “If you were going from A to B, would you take the A123 or the B345?” Agggh.
I know, right? My ex son in law, who ran a car repair shop, would call me every time one of his PCs was on the fritz or his parts ordering software wasn’t working right or something.
I wanted to load up my lawn mower in the back of my car and drop it off at his shop. “Well, you work on engines, right?”