Things That Annoy You

[West of the Rockies]

Ah, yet another thing that annoys me:  the media's (and our) obsession with fashion.  I see critics wondering if Kiera Knightly wore a "recycled gown" in which to get married.  Who cares?  If she did, wouldn't that maybe be a good thing, that someone did not go out and spend $10,000 on a dress that is going to be worn once?  If she wasn't a Bridezilla, isn't that a good thing?

[ItsOver]

Ah, yet another thing that annoys me:  the media's (and our) obsession with fashion.  I see critics wondering if Kiera Knightly wore a "recycled gown" in which to get married.  Who cares?  If she did, wouldn't that maybe be a good thing, that someone did not go out and spend $10,000 on a dress that is going to be worn once?  If she wasn't a Bridezilla, isn't that a good thing?

Hahahaha...I just came back from the grocery, another annoyance.  I passed the magazine rack in the store, where the likes of Knightly, Paltrow, et al were plastered all over the front covers, in all their photo-shopped glory.  This was after being annoyed by clones pushing carts who couldn't put their smart phones down long enough to avoid blocking aisles or aimlessly running into others.  Smart phones... yeah, right... how ironic.

[ItsOver]

Art's not coming back on the radio, Noory won't leave the radio, and now no ABBA reunion.


http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/06/entertainment-us-abba-idUSBRE9450I620130506

[FightTheFuture]

Hahahaha...I just came back from the grocery, another annoyance.  I passed the magazine rack in the store, where the likes of Knightly, Paltrow, et al were plastered all over the front covers, in all their photo-shopped glory.  This was after being annoyed by clones pushing carts who couldn't put their smart phones down long enough to avoid blocking aisles or aimlessly running into others.  Smart phones... yeah, right... how ironic.

Good God! I can`t stand that whiny, narcissistic little prima donna (Paltrow)! That goes for for her wife, Chrissy, too!

[Sardondi]

Good God! I can`t stand that whiny, narcissistic little prima donna (Paltrow)! That goes for for her wife, Chrissy, too!

Her self-righteous whining and pontificating has totally ruined Shakespeare In Love for me. She has even taken her moralistic preening to cookbooks. Just think of that: a cookbook by Gwyneth Paltrow. What rational person with the least amount of self-regard would want it and actually use it? But then People magazine has remained in business for some 40 years, so I suppose there's also a market for how a celebrity makes her famous cardboard-and-dust souffle with air sauce.

[MV/Liberace!]

I am 78wpm... maybe our mind-typing contributed to our nimble fingers?

it certainly couldn't have hurt.

[MV/Liberace!]

Good God! I can`t stand that whiny, narcissistic little prima donna (Paltrow)! That goes for for her wife, Chrissy, too!

i find her physically revolting.  i can't quite explain why... but her face reminds me of dog the bounty hunter.

[Sardondi]

i find her physically revolting.  i can't quite explain why... but her face reminds me of dog the bounty hunter.

That is cold, man. I'm sure it says loads about me that I could sooner listen to the Dog's shallow moralizing than that of the Human Stick Figure, but then I can't stand listening to the Dog or his freakish GF/wife/concubine.

[ItsOver]

i find her physically revolting.  i can't quite explain why... but her face reminds me of dog the bounty hunter.

I can see it.  They both look like ice queens.

[stevesh]

The fact that anything I order online that is shipped via US Postal Service almost always arrives at my house before any tracking information is available. The USPS tracking updates must be done by hand by some union slug in a green eyeshade.

[Sardondi]

The fact that anything I order online that is shipped via US Postal Service almost always arrives at my house before any tracking information is available. The USPS tracking updates must be done by hand by some union slug in a green eyeshade.

I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, but I find that UPS is having its ass handed to it by FedEx as far as speed of delivery and service in general. Although UPS employees do work like galley slaves during December.

[Juan]

I talked to my postman, uh,letter carrier just a few days about this.  He showed me a hand scanning gun, much like UPS and FedEx have.  He says the USPS has only recently handed them out.  There was a lot of resistance from the old hands on the post office floor.  Sounds usual.

[stevesh]

I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, but I find that UPS is having its ass handed to it by FedEx as far as speed of delivery and service in general. Although UPS employees do work like galley slaves during December.

The partnership between FedEx and the USPS (FedEx ships to the local post office for delivery) seems to be working better than I would have expected here, but still no tracking info. I know my UPS guy is really glad to see the Christmas season end, overtime or not.

[stevesh]

The fact that whatever pindick bureaucrats made the decision to mandate those beep-beep-beep backup alarms for earth-moving equipment obviously never lived near a construction site.

Heard the same alarm on a Rascal at the supermarket yesterday.

[ItsOver]

Speaking of aggravating noise generators, how about leaf blowers?  This time of year, I sometimes feel like I'm living on a runway at Chicago O'Hare.

[MV/Liberace!]

I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, but I find that UPS is having its ass handed to it by FedEx as far as speed of delivery and service in general. Although UPS employees do work like galley slaves during December.

you mean UPS, not USPS?

[999]

Her self-righteous whining and pontificating has totally ruined Shakespeare In Love for me. She has even taken her moralistic preening to cookbooks. Just think of that: a cookbook by Gwyneth Paltrow. What rational person with the least amount of self-regard would want it and actually use it? But then People magazine has remained in business for some 40 years, so I suppose there's also a market for how a celebrity makes her famous cardboard-and-dust souffle with air sauce.

For the life of me, I can't understand why that movie won 7 Oscars. 

[Sardondi]

you mean UPS, not USPS?

No, I meant UPS. I wouldn't have said anything about the USPS anyway since my Mom told me it's not nice to make fun of retarded people. Or was that speaking ill of the dead? I forget.

[MV/Liberace!]

No, I meant UPS. I wouldn't have said anything about the USPS anyway since my Mom told me it's not nice to make fun of retarded people. Or was that speaking ill of the dead? I forget.

haha, you're very considerate.

[HorrorRetro]

Speaking of aggravating noise generators, how about leaf blowers?  This time of year, I sometimes feel like I'm living on a runway at Chicago O'Hare.

Some jackhole in the 'hood started mowing his lawn at 9:30 last night.  I don't care that it's still a bit light out at that time.  9:30 is not a cool time to mow your lawn.  :

[Eddie Coyle]

Some jackhole in the 'hood started mowing his lawn at 9:30 last night.  I don't care that it's still a bit light out at that time.  9:30 is not a cool time to mow your lawn.  :

The very reason I won't move out of my neighborhood. We don't have lawns or yards for annoying stuff like that. The few months I lived in the suburbs when first married were full of that type of idiocy. I'd get home from work at 6am...to be awoken at 7:30 by some persnickety hedge trimming asshat. One spring of that was enough.

          And the smell of mulch sent me back to the concrete jungle.

[FightTheFuture]

Lawyers. Not all lawyers, but many; like these creeps (check out the guy who billed his client for banging her!) :


http://www.startribune.com/local/207070851.html?refer=y

[ItsOver]

Some jackhole in the 'hood started mowing his lawn at 9:30 last night.  I don't care that it's still a bit light out at that time.  9:30 is not a cool time to mow your lawn.  :

9:30 PM?  He must have a headlight on his John Deere.  I usually mow in the morning, the earlier the better to beat the heat and humidity but I try not to mow too early out of consideration for others.  I hate all the lawn-related instruments of noise but the continuous drone of leaf blowers is driving me up the wall.  One time, I left the house to get away from it all and went to the local shopping area.  Of course, the blowers we're all over that place, rearranging the weeds and my ears. 


I'm with Eddie, though.  I'm about ready to go urban to get away from the suburban "lawn wars."  Or maybe I'll just build a tree house in a big preserve somewhere.  Maybe Art was on to something about living in the middle of the desert.   

[Sardondi]

...I usually mow in the morning, the earlier the better to beat the heat and humidity but I try not to mow too early out of consideration for others.  I hate all the lawn-related instruments of noise but the continuous drone of leaf blowers is driving me up the wall.
I'm with Eddie, though. I'm about ready to go urban to get away from the suburban "lawn wars."  Or maybe I'll just build a tree house in a big preserve somewhere.  Maybe Art was on to something about living in the middle of the desert. 

Anyone cranking up the mower before 8:00 a.m. in an urban or suburban setting should be shot. It is barbaric. But for those of you pining for the Big Wide Open, just know that it ain't everything that pussy dilettante Thoreau made it out to be.

I was raised in a rural area. About a half mile away was a neighbor who raised maybe 100 roosters at a time, all in separate little cages. I didn't think about the reason, I just knew they were damn noisy. Any fowl, be they domesticated chickens or barn swallows, either male or female, rise with the dawn. And the males sing to the light. Those roosters literally crowed, that old "errrgh-er-errrgh-er-errrrrghhhh!!!. Every.Fucking.Day. It could go on for hours. Now, remember, "dawn" is not "sunrise". Sunrise actually comes about an hour after dawn, or "first light", which is what the roosters crowed at. Hell, they even crowed at the moon sometimes. And even though they were a half mile away, they woke me long before I wanted to be woken. Plus my neighbor also had guinea fowl, the cocks of which species emit a terrible screeching sound which was given to them by Lucifer when he created those vermin with wings. This terrible cacophony haunted my truncated dreams throughout childhood.

Why might my neighbor have so many roosters? I didn't really think about until a couple of decades later when I was running a wiretap of some meth manufacturers who were also cockfighters on the side for fun. We happened to also intercept my neighbor calling the meth manufacturer about the betting lines for upcoming cockfights. The nickel finally dropped for me. My neighbor was not a drug dealer though, and we weren't interested in violations of state laws about cockfighting (illegal in my state). So in accordance with federal wiretap law, when the case was over we notified a number of people who happened to have been intercepted in conversations which were not terribly illegal. We merely sent them a notice that said "Between such-and-such dates you were intercepted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a telephone call to telephone number (123) 456-7890.

Some people call in scared to death about what the notice means, will they go to jail, etc. Most people play possum, hoping it will all go away. Which it does if they're good. My neighbor just laid low. He knew who I was and what I did but he never spoke to me or my family about his notice. Just treated it like the unacknowledged elephant in the room if we happened across each other. And he never stopped cockfighting apparently, since even as late as last month when I went to visit my parents I heard "his boys" at his gladiator school for roosters.

Sound picturesque to you? Quirky? Offbeat? Fun, even? Maybe. But I would rather have had the hundreds of hours of sleep that they stole from me. So remember that before you think you can go all Oliver Wendell Douglas and move to Green Acres. Don't expect to see Mr Haney and the gang at Sam Drucker's general store. You'll still have to deal with getting ripped off by Dom and Sal, held up by Levar and Quintorus, clipped by Abramowicz and Aaronstein Ltd., cheated by Mustafa and Son; it's just that they'll be called Jim Bob and Billy Earl. 

[stevesh]

Pricks at AT&T just raised the price of my (crappy - < 3Mbs) DSL service another $3 a month. Cable company, here I come.

[MV/Liberace!]

Pricks at AT&T just raised the price of my (crappy - < 3Mbs) DSL service another $3 a month. Cable company, here I come.

you probably should have made that move long ago anyway.  dsl is woefully slow and doing business with a traditional telco is just HELL.  i'd much rather deal with the annoyances of a cable company.  at least they're likely to have call centers staffed by people who speak proper english. 


you probably just increased your bandwidth by 10x, btw.

[stevesh]

You're probably right. I just checked my DSL speed - 2.8 Mbs. The cable company here (WOW) advertises 15 Mbs for $9 more a month than I'm paying AT&T.

[Sardondi]

You're probably right. I just checked my DSL speed - 2.8 Mbs. The cable company here (WOW) advertises 15 Mbs for $9 more a month than I'm paying AT&T.

My son, who certainly knows more than I, though that is no tech recommendation, says upload is the important figure because of the interaction with sites. I always assumed dl was it.

[MV/Liberace!]

My son, who certainly knows more than I, though that is no tech recommendation, says upload is the important figure because of the interaction with sites. I always assumed dl was it.

he's right.  upload bandwidth is the first thing i ask about when a sales person mentions download speeds.  they always seem nonplussed when i do that.

[ziznak]

I'm with ATT and for some reason just in the last week or so my service has suddenly sucked ... dropped calls and then the (no service) message instead of the carrier id thingy... I'm wondering if it has something to do with the leaves that have sprung up on the bushes outside. I'm in a brick apartment building on the first floor (more like basement) and my window in the front has these bushes in front of it... that window is really the only place I guess a signal can really go... could the leaves have some crap to do with it? these bushes were mostly bare up until recently.