1 – I hate when I’m stopped in traffic and decide to be nice by letting someone in from a driveway or side street, only to have them twiddle their thumbs about it. When I decide to let you in, it’s a limited time offer. I’m not going to wait all day for you to mosey into traffic. I’m being nice here! Take advantage of it now or I’ll ram you! I actually get annoyed when people pantomime-ask if they can sneak in front of me when it’s obvious that was my intention. I tend to ruin any goodwill derived from being nice with my impatience.
2 – I hate when I pull into a parking lot to find a bunch of people parked over the lines like total assholes, then, when I come out from the store, all the other assholes are gone and I’m the only one parked like an asshole. I want to shout to anyone in earshot, “There were a bunch of assholes here who made me park like this when I got here! I swear, I’m not normally an asshole!” Then I quickly get in my car and leave in shame before I get any more “you’re an asshole” looks.
3 – I hate when the car behind me honks and the car in front of me thinks I was the one who did it. If I honk, you’ll know it. I don’t like being blamed for someone else’s actions, even if it is just a honk.
4 – Website pop up boxes on mobile phones. I hate visiting a site on my phone only to have a box pop up say, “sign up to our email list, get a free case of the herpes!” It’s annoying, but simple enough to click on the X when you’re on a computer. This easy task becomes nearly impossible on a phone. It takes a ton of scrolling and zooming just to find the X, let alone click the damn thing. By that time, I’ve forgotten why I even went to the website in the first place.
5 – Strangely labeled bathrooms. Ladies and gentlemen, men and women, even guys and gals, or simply this will work:
I don’t want to have to think about which room to use. I just want to pee. I can’t stand nonsense like this:
A full bladder tends to blot out my symbols knowledge, so I don’t know off-hand whether I’m an arrow or a cross. Neither of those is particularly intuitive of the female anatomy. Using logic, I’d say I’m a cross since that’s where the arrow would aim like a target, but I don’t want to have to use logic or think of my lady bits as a target just to pee. If you’re going to use a symbol, please, put words there, too.
6 – Vacuuming. I hate it. I also hate the word since it’s hard to spell. Does any word really need two Us in a row? Greedy. Anyway, with carpet, a dog and a cat, I have no choice but to vacuum every week. I probably should vacuum more than that, but once a week is standard. When I empty the canister–a task I find both disgusting and oddly satisfying–there’s enough fur in there to build another dog/cat from scratch every week.
7 – People who don’t understand how lines (or queues for my peeps over the pond) work. At convenience stores, 7‑Eleven in particular, it’s an unwritten rule that the queue goes along the counter away from the door. This is a diagram of the layout of your typical 7‑Eleven and the way the line is supposed to work with the black dots representing people:
Most of the time it works that way, but then comes the outlier who is somehow completely unfamiliar with the rules of convenience stores and lines up through the aisles like so:
Which of course causes everyone else to go into a panic thinking that maybe they’ve been doing it wrong this whole time. NO. I don’t care how gross those hot dogs on rollers look, you stand there. It’s the unwritten rule. Line up by the rolling hot dogs, dammit!
8 – Work meetings. I had forgotten how awful they are. At my old job, say I needed to go over something with my boss or vice versa, I would walk into his office and ask if he had a minute. If he said no, he’d call me when he did. If he said yes, I would sit down in one of the several chairs there, explain the situation and get a verdict. The whole process would take no more than a half an hour, usually 10-15 minutes.
At my current job, in addition to the process outlined above, we also have monthly production meetings, which are scheduled in advance, include everyone involved in production (that’s at least 8 regular and 4 or so rotating), take at least an hour, and accomplish precisely nothing except wasting an hour. But we all get typed up meeting minutes afterward so we can show how little we actually accomplished.
The worst is that instead of having the meeting in the conference room where there are plenty of chairs, the manager holds it in her office where there are only five chairs. If you don’t get their early or bring your own chair, you don’t sit.
9 – Extremely obtrusive panhandlers. I don’t mind if you ask me for change when I’m walking into a store, but do not come up to my car, knock on the window, and demand money from me like I owe you. No. You get nothing. Or worse, get indignant about it when I say no.
10 – Lists that claim to have 10 things on them, but then when you read them, there are only 9. It throws my mental calculations, such as they are, all off. Can’t you count or are you just lazy?
Fish Of Gold 