I find this interesting to think about; it’s hard for me to come up with sounds I dislike that aren’t self-evidently annoying.
A lot of rap bothers me because the tone of voice is so hostile and aggressive… it’s like overhearing a nasty argument in the next room… even (or maybe especially) if you can’t quite make out the words… it just sets off my stress response. And I do NOT need that!
The sound of someone playing with pocket change. It’s the sound combined with the idea of someone playing pocketball that just sets my teeth on edge.
When I worked in retail, whistlers would make me mental. It was probably the job and the clientele that made the whistling so rage-inducing.
When cardboard rubs against cardboard just the wrong way. I can’t even explain it.
I agree with the comments about children singing, especially when used as a marketing ploy. Unless it’s my child singing, I don’t want to hear it, and I won’t subject you to it unless you join us in Rock Band.
These *should * fall under the nails-on-a-chalkboard category: Nail clipping in the office and wet mouth noises (open-mouth chewing, slurping, etc). Ugh ugh ugh!
Oh, thank you so much for that. Not only do I live in terror of numbers stations, now I have BACKWARDS number stations to ponder. (seriously. I was terrified by the radio transmission on the first season of ‘Lost’.)
I will add: sheriff’s department helicopter with searchlight buzzing the neighborhood in the middle of the night. I always wonder if there’s an escaped convict lurking in the bushes outside and if I remembered to close the windows and lock up.
I heard a rabbit scream one night. I’d never heard it before, didn’t even know rabbits could scream, but the second I heard that noise, I KNEW it was the mother rabbit who lived in a burrow with her babies in it, on our front lawn. A pretty sight she was, standing guard under the full moon, and then one night that awful sound…I went running out and sure enough, there was a black cat lurking on the lawn, and I chased that mother all the way up the street. I don’t think he hurt any rabbits, though. I kept an eye out for that cat every night and eventually the rabbits left the burrow and moved on.
The crunching of any food (especially ice and corn on the cob.)
Eating-related noises bother me the most.
The slurpy-crunchy lip-smacky sounds of a bowl of cereal being eaten with the mouth open.
There was an episode of “NewsRadio” once where Dave Foley’s character was annoyed by the sounds Phil Hartman’s character was making. There was one shot where Dave was watching him eat a bowl of cereal and it was in slow motion close-up with the crunching and chewing noises amplified and it was pretty much unbearable to watch. That’s how I feel whenever I hear my stepson slurping down a bowl of cereal.
The woman in the cube next to me at work brings a cup of yogurt to work every day for breakfast. The scrape-scrape-scrape of the plastic spoon on the side of the container so she can get every last morsel of yogurt-y goodness out of the cup just drives me up the wall.
Co-worker on the other side of me who burps constantly. If he did it once or twice a day, I wouldn’t mind it, but he does it all. the. time. All day long. Maybe you should lay off the fizzy pop a bit, buddy.
My sophomore year in college, I roomed with a guy I just really was ill-suited to live with, but the closest I ever came to killing him was the night I was trying to get a paper written, and he was reading a book and eating a bag of chips.
Chip into mouth, mouth simultaneously crunching down on the chip while the lips closed. Somehow the muting effect of the lips closing around the crunching sound just made it worse.
At my job I share customer service duties with two co-workers, and answering phone calls from clients is just another part of the daily grind. Unless I’m really trying to concentrate on something, a ringing phone doesn’t bother me much. But we have two dedicated phone lines. So even while I’m speaking to a client, a second call may come in at any time. And if my co-workers aren’t available to answer the other line, it keep ringing until the voicemail system picks it up. I can’t quite account for it, but the ringing of the second line makes my blood boil every time. I can go from quiet and relaxed to “Oh. My. Fucking. God. I. Want. To. Club. Baby. Harp. Seals. Now.” in less than half a second.
Too many to name. I think I’m aurally hypersensitive, though. I tend to strongly dislike any noise caused by someone other than myself. I like plenty of music and loud noises, but I have to be in control of them.
Nail clipping or filing.
Bananas being chewed.
Honking horns.
Coworkers talking about anything other than work.
My mother talking about anything superfluous (99% of her conversation is superfluous, she never shuts the fuck up).
Slamming doors.
This bitch coworker who loudly hums the lion king theme to herself from 3 cubicles away, and gets it stuck in my head.
I have a few:
-Teeth grinding
-That sound people make in their throats just before they hawk a loogie
-Children screaming
-The earsplitting squeal the T makes when it pulls into the Boylston Street station. I live in DC. Our Metro does not make noises like this.
A woman keening.
The screaming baby on an airplane.
Dogs barking incessantly late night.
When music starts playing during a movie. It’s always much louder than the dialogue and really annoying.
Car alarms.
Unexpected knocking at the door-- anyone but friends and family.
The sound of Gilbert Gottfried’s voice.
Scraping sounds from moving furniture across the floor.
Eating noises or any unnecessary noise that comes from the mouth.
My boyfriend’s nail gun. He’s always working on the house and I hate it when he doesn’t warn me first about using the nail gun.
+1, especially in a cinema, or restaurant…
I’d a friend who would sniff like the blazes when she had a cold, drove me insane. Then she’d start complaining about a headache. No bleedin’ wonder, you’re sinuses are blocked!!
My what?
Where did she think the snot was going?!!?
OMG, that must’ve been what I heard one evening, awful noise, knew it wasn’t foxes, but couldn’t think what it might have been. (sorry for the loss of your rabbit)
My own personal hatred is people going ssshhh sshhhh to sooth someone else. Completely grinds my gears.
The sound of my cat vomiting in the middle of the night. That stuttering hhh…hhh…hhh that make me sit bolt-upright in the middle of the night thinking “I have to get her over tile!”
A co-worker of mine got the news at work that her father had killed himself.
The scream and the sobbing that followed haunted me and everyone else at work to the bone.
I don’t know why people break news like this to family members in such a manner.
If it was me I would just say get home dad is sick then tell her. Luckily someone drove her home.
The sirens going off for a tornado warning. I live in Kansas, smack dab in the middle of Tornado Alley, and that long, rolling moan that rises and falls creeps me out.
A Doper who no longer posts here once said the following, during the Terry Schaivo controversy.
“If you want to know if I’m really alive bring in a cat that’s horking up a hairball. If I don’t immediately leap off the bed and say ‘Not on the carpet, not on the carpet!’, then you know I’m gone.”
Oh god, my husband gets those fruit on the bottom yogurts, so first I have to listen to him stir the damn thing a hundred times, then the eating noises, and then the scrape scrape scrape. All of it makes me feel like I’m going crazy in my head. And it’s just a normal human thing to make a little noise with stuff like that, but it makes me irrational.
For some reason I dislike the sound the ball makes when it falls into the cup.