And one more - that of racial/cultural superiority without the CDF to work out that we're all an accident of birth and therefore had no choice in the matter.
I'm trying to imagine what the price of gas would be if we still had that Texaco guy in the bowtie and military hat running out to pump our fuel and clean our windshields. I haven't conducted a study or anything, but I doubt very much if the proliferation of self-serve checkouts in supermarkets has lowered food prices at all. I refuse to use them. The grocery chain where I shop eliminated baggers (most of whom were mentally-challenged young people), at about the same time as the self-serve lanes were introduced, in favor of plastic bag carousels at the checkout lanes. Seems to work all right, but I wish those kids still had those jobs. I've also noticed that the more upscale the store's neighborhood, the more popular the self-service lanes are. At one store I frequent, I've seen customers lined up at the self-serve lanes while cashiers were standing at the store end of their lanes, looking for someone to help. All that said, I haven't been inside a bank in years except to open and close accounts. My simple banking needs are handled well by ATMs and I like the 24 hour access. I'm not sure why I don't care as much about tellers as I do about baggers, but I definitely remember having to rush to the bank to deposit a check or get some cash (remember writing checks to 'Cash'?) before they closed at 4:30. The guy who came up with the idea of direct deposit should have received a Nobel Prize in economics.
Stop trolling. That thread was about the Iranian response to the attack, not the attacks directly. If you want to talk about the attacks then start a thread about the attacks. If you want to talk about the Muslim opinion of the attacks (the conversation going on) then engage in the discussion of a thread about the Muslim opinion of the attacks. In that thread, posters expressed their own condemnation of the attacks on the first page anyway, they just didn't use pointlessly impassioned jingoism to express it.
Okay, this thread has gone exactly where all threads of this nature go. They always transition from "what annoys you about ______?" to "what annoys you?"
I don't know if it's still the case, but I was in Nova Scotia about 10 years ago, and all their filling stations were 'manned' (and womaned) by an attendant who came out and filled the tank and did the bits. We were so startled when a boy approached the car for the first time that we were reluctant to roll the window down, not knowing what he wanted! And the price of gas was the same as everywhere else at the time. It was like a trip to The Land That Time Forgot, and it was a good one. Really made me appreciate what we've lost.'' I do like ATMs and telephone banking, though. Gotta admit it. But this is based entirely upon the fact that my bank has an excellent telephone service, manned by employees of the company who know exactly what they're doing. When I call, I get through right away, to a relatively local person (Scottish accent) who knows what he or she is doing. (And we also still have a local branch bank that I can visit if I need to ...which I occasionally do. I'm not being a hypocrite here, by the way. We were forced to use the telephone banking service when all our wages and pensions started being paid directly into the bank, and we had no control over this process. That's why we stopped going to the bank to deposit cheques, etc. There were no more cheques.) At the moment, the semi-automated banking is okay. However if they were to move the banking customer services to generic call centres and my concerns were addressed via script by people who basically don't have a clue, I shudder to think what that would mean.
Anyone on a phone in the checkout line...Don't inflict rude indifference on the cashier or other customers. Put the wretched device down for two minutes and the world will not come to a screaming halt.
What really narks me is when people treat celebrates like Justin Beiber or whatever as important. Why live vicariously through these people?
Street preachers. If I wanted to listen to that, then I would go to church rather than endure their demented rants. People being called "Legends." It doesn't take a lot to be a legend anymore!
I absolutely despise the use this word in this way. Maybe this is only an Australian thing, but it is almost as bad as people who ran the word epic into the ground. Come to think of it, I despise a lot of Australian slang.
The current insistence on calling everyone who serves or has served in the military 'heroes'. A hero is someone who does something utterly selfless at the risk/cost of his or her own life. You also aren't a hero just because you were the victim of a heinous crime. Other than the first responders, most of the people who died in the towers on 9/11 were just unlucky, not heroic.
You're leaving out the greatest heroes of all: people who bravely and heroically ... get cancer, or other such ailments. I do not wish to belittle people with serious conditions, but the insistence on calling people heroes for going through chemotherapy rather then just giving up and dying is absolutely ridiculous.
Yup, another great example. By the way, there's a difference between declaring someone your hero and a hero. I did read a definition a long time ago (not a verbatim quote): "A hero is a man who spends forty years or more, his whole working life, commuting from Connecticut to New York City to a job he absolutely hates so that his wife can live and his children can grow up in a cleaner, safer place." I'm still thinking about that one.
Big cars. Have you the size of a Mini or Beetle lately? SUV's the size of a small ferry parking in spots indicated with SMALL CARS ONLY signage.
