This week’s Writing Challenge is lists, because I don’t do enough of those at all. It’s not like I have a whole category devoted to Lists, I just wrote a list three days ago, or like this is part 26 of the Things I Hate series, which marks 260 hated things in list form.
Anyway, I haven’t done a Things I Hate in a while, so here we are.
1. I hate how every time there’s a disturbed mass shooter, like the one in Santa Barbara on Friday, the conversation always turns to gun control instead of the real culprit–the abysmal state of mental health services in the United States.
From personal experience, I can tell you that getting mental health care in this country, specifically in California where both the latest shooter and I live, is next to impossible. It is not fast. It is not easy. It is not cheap. You have to really want it. If you’re disturbed enough to go on a shooting spree, odds are, you aren’t going to wait around for months and months for treatment and pay out the ass for it like I did.
2. Misinformation. Here’s a helpful tip for you: Not everything you read on the internet is true. In the age of the internet and 24-hour news networks, there are a lot of reactionary stories rushed to “press” without checking or even getting facts. Investigative journalism is compromised when everyone is clamoring for information right now. Adding “alleged” in front of an action doesn’t make it any more true.
I wrote a post not too long ago about how major media outlets just repost the same baseless information they find in other media outlets and call it news without doing any investigation at all. This is not right.
3. Bad service. I know restaurants and stores get busy. If it’s quite obvious that you’re busy, I’m willing to cut some slack. I don’t mind waiting as long as the ten people who came in after me don’t get served first.
This weekend, I had lunch at one of those places where you order at the counter, sit at a table with your number and wait for them to bring your food. My friend and I ordered separately and had two numbers. Her lunch came about five minutes after we sat down. Ten minutes after that, I still had no food and I had ordered first. I ordered a sandwich. There wasn’t even cooking involved.
I walked up to the counter with anger-smoke escaping my ears and held my number up. The response I got was, “It will be right out.” A few minutes later, a lackluster employee walked up to my table and plopped down a crooked sandwich with no chips. It was supposed to come with chips.
A few minutes later, she essentially threw some chips on my table. I got no apology. I didn’t even get a half-hearted “sorry.” All I got was half of my order twenty minutes late. Fuck you. I will never eat there again. Fuck youuuuuuuuuu.
4. I hate when restaurants don’t list all the ingredients on the menu. I hate raw onions. Specifically, I hate how they’ve become standard on lunch type items like sandwiches and salads, as if every human being just loves biting into raw onion. Ick.
You’ll see something like this on a menu: The Triple Fatty Fatty Burger – five pounds of ground Angus chuck, slathered in half a gallon of BBQ sauce, topped with three pounds of bacon, an entire block of cheese, all loaded on a loaf of bread.
OK, I don’t see anything about onions in there. Cool. Then you get your Triple Fatty Fatty Burger only to find that it’s topped with all of the above and lettuce and tomato and pickles and raw onion. Dammit! Foiled again.
If there are onions in there, I want to know so I can either emphatically say, “No onions, pls,” or order something else. I always ask with things like chicken or tuna salad, because they usually chop raw onion up and hide it in there. There’s nothing worse than taking a big bite of salad only to find that they have surreptitiously sabotaged your lunch with the horrid flavor of raw onion.
5. I hate how celebrity opinions are valued. These days, people get all up in celebrities’ personal lives. It seems that if you have a modicum of fame, your views on politics or child-birthin’ can have a platform. Just because someone is on the TV, that doesn’t mean that we should give two craps about their opinion. They do a job, whether it’s sports, music, acting, etc. They’re paid to do that job and in the relative scheme of things, that job is not particularly hard. Acting is easier and requires way less knowledge than, say, neurosurgery. Stick with that.
I don’t care what celebrities have to say about anything and I damn sure don’t want robo-Scarlett Johansson on my voice mail telling me about the Affordable Care Act. Celebrities, I don’t care what you think. Go away.
6. Speaking of celebrities, I hate people who are famous for no reason. Two words: Paris Hilton. She did absolutely nothing besides have the good fortune to be born into the Hilton family and make a sex tape. Kim Kardashian. Go away. I don’t care about you, your family, your twentieth marriage or your sex tape. Whatever happened to celebrities becoming celebrities because they did something? Reality television, that’s what happened.
7. Freeloaders. I have relatives who visit my parents every summer. They sit on their asses as if they’re at a bed and breakfast while my mom does all the cooking and cleaning up after them. They do nothing. They contribute nothing. None of the three kids, ranging in age from mid to late thirties, have jobs. They all sponge off their parents. Get a damn job. Support yourself. Don’t expect other people to clean up after your messes. Get off my lawn.
8. I hate how dependent on technology I’ve become in just a few short decades. I can’t really write much by hand anymore. I’m way out of practice and my hand cramps up. I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to remember how to use a paper map or the Dewey decimal system. I can’t remember how to research things without Google. I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with anyone without my phone or Facebook. I don’t even remember my own phone number. All of that happened in just a few short years and it’s pretty scary. In another few decades, I’ll forget how to breathe without my Autonomicator 3000.
9. I hate when people try to do something nice and it ends up endangering everyone around them. For example, I was driving behind an enormous SUV today that suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. There was no light, cross walk, stop sign or any other reason I could see for stopping. Because of the size of the vehicle, I couldn’t see the pedestrian that the SUV stopped to let cross until he got to the other side of it. I nearly plowed right into the SUV because the driver was trying to be nice. I have no problem with nice. I do have a problem with nearly causing an accident because of it.
10. Bad graphic design. Specifically, so-called professional or commercial design used by companies trying to make money.
I am a graphic designer. It’s what I do for a living. Unfortunately for me, graphic design is everywhere. It’s on billboards, bumper stickers, business signs, television, sports teams, album art, movie posters, snail mail, every single product you can buy and every website out there, etc.
As a graphic designer, my brain automatically grades every bit of design I see, which is everything all the time. It’s an occupational hazard.
They paid for that? Why on earth would they use that font? The kerning is all wrong. That stroke is ridiculous. That’s way too much bevel. I can’t even read that. Is that clip art? What the hell is that even supposed to say? OW, MY EYES.
I can’t help it and I hate it. Stop doing bad graphic design, please. I beg you.
Fish Of Gold 