Do you ever notice how there are just some days you can’t help but be overly annoyed by everything? Behaviors and tendencies that on most days are tolerated reasonably well make your teeth clench and your face scrunch up unattractively and your eyes squint menacingly? You can convince yourself on those days that there really oughta be a law against so many of society’s practices that are both common and accepted,but that – notwithstanding – enough of us can agree should just be stopped. At the very least, public shaming should be encouraged. Herewith I spill my own list:
1. Pants with faux pockets. Don’t ever buy them; the sheer disingenuity of them should be enough of a reason. And insanely shallow pockets are nearly as bad – you will constantly worry that whatever you put in them will shimmy itself out. Maybe you’re supposed to treat them like faux pockets anyway, and not use them. . . so don’t put them on the pants in the first place. It seems an even greater betrayal when brands that have inspired your loyalty suddenly and without explanation or disclaimer produce the same style in all ways EXCEPT that now there are shallow pockets to replace the earlier reassuringly deep ones.
2. Webpage layout shifting. You know how when you arrive on some webpage and your eyes start to feed your brain with the information, and then the information jumps, so that you have to reorient yourself. This is especially maddening when the shift happens at precisely the moment when you click on a link, but because the content has jumped, you are clicking on an entirely different link. It is not reassuring in the least to know the cause, which is that as asynchronous Ajax partials are loading, these little buggers are upsetting the initial render. Equally unhelpful to know is that you can fix this source of irritation via some clever CSS’ing. Don’t taunt me with words like “easy fix” if they’re in company with a word such as “CSS”. My feeble adaptive strategy is that I now leave any site on which I am thus ambushed twice in the first minute.
3. Personal fireworks late at night. When people set them off after 11:00pm, I automatically suppose the revelers to be well “into their cups”. If it’s close to my house there’s the added late summer stressor of, if one lands on the roof will my house go up in flames? I am further aggrieved when my dogs then commence barking way too excitedly. . . and proceed to invite me to take them out for potty. I wonder, too, when I hold my breath the next day as I drive over the duds with my lawn tractor, should I instead be stopping before each one of them, dismounting, and collecting them; i.e., will I blow myself up if I don’t?
4. Saying irregardless. Don’t. No matter that its nonstandard overuse has resulted in it becoming an acceptable variant of the word.
5. Scratchy labels on clothing. Typically these are made of course, sharp-edged “fabric” and are permanently fastened to the article of clothing with plastic thread (of all the stupidest innovations, and I say “innovation” scornfully.) The odds are better than even that you will cut into a sweater’s carotid if you try to surgically remove one. Ironically, seams can come completely undone, but a label “ain’t goin nowhere.” I may be imagining a kinder, friendlier time, but it seems to me that couture clothing companies once upon a time attached their labels with easily removable stitches. Snip, snip, and done. And long before there was mass production (or fashion houses), and people made their own clothing, this wasn’t an issue. The clothing, too, was meant to last, I mean really last. In fact, during colonial times when people wrote out their wills, along with their dwelling house, commonage interests, and iron tools; they cared deeply about the fate of their “wearing apparill”. Imagine seeing Caleb
6. Shaken-up seltzer bottles. They look harmless enough, sitting silently at attention on the store shelf, blending in with their innocent neighbors. Your first thought, though, is: I hope this isn’t one of “them”. Appearances will tell you nothing, however; you won’t really know if it is one of “them” until it detonates in your kitchen. It doesn’t stop you from studying the bottle from all. . . well, not angles per se, but by rotating it as if one hopes to find some small portent of what is to come. If only we had a way to signal when a bottle has previously been dropped on the floor. Perhaps the bottle would change color, or the offender – following the honor system – could flip a switch right on the bottle that indicates that it has become one of “them”. My suggestion here is that we hand off the problem to an M.I.T. student. But aren’t Coke and ginger ale bottles the absolute worst when it comes to the deadly carbonation ambush?
There’s a sense of futility inherent in an exercise such as this, for once you’ve begun a list of grievances, you quickly become aware that there will be no end. . . at least if it’s one of those days when everything grates on your nerves. Imagine if I had chosen to include other people’s annoying driving habits or grocery store tendencies or cell-phone usage. To be sure, I am not without my own annoying foibles; just ask Megan about my talking while chewing. . . or asking over and over while watching a movie, “what did he (or she) just say?”. Now that I think about it, the list of my irritating behaviors might be pretty long, too.
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