Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

Not always, at least here in semi-rural Germany. There are junctions here that have wildly different traffic patterns (more cars during the working days, more bicycles [on separate lanes and crossing the car lanes at junctions] on weekends etc.) There are induction coils for the cars, and the buttons are there for pedestrians and bicycles. They work, they count how much traffic there is on each channel, and the lights do change their timing based on the traffic as counted by coils and button presses.

There are also crossings with attachments for visually impaired folks that only activate (vibrate and beeping for green) after a button is pressed. These also change timing after button presses (which is continuously confirmed by a lengthy, still ongoing study performed by students of the nearby secondary school...)

 

The overwhelming prevalence of the latter.

 

Ooh. . . So accurate.

 

Watching some football highlights from last year. Apparently, if you're designing new uniforms, you need to use the weirdest font possible for the numbers so the unis look cool.

 

You married a Santa? And shouldn't it be "ho ho," not "hey ho"?

 

I do neither

 

Yeah, you can overlook a lot . . . but I still shudder at the memory of a waitress I had a few years ago. The policy at this restaurant was for the servers to squat down at the side of the table while taking your order. The management thought it was friendlier and less intimidating, I guess; I just felt condescended to, like I was a small child.

So here's this young woman, and since I'm short, her mouth is at my eye level. And she's got this damned big piercing stud in her tongue, and every time she asks me what we want to eat, it's right there in my face, bouncing up and down, and looking grossly unsanitary. I clenched my stomach and ordered anyway, but it was horribly unappetizing.

No, we didn't go back.

 

That sounds like possibly the stupidest and most foolish policy I’ve ever heard. I’d have to ask her to stand up and take my order like a normal person.

 

I have a heaps of ADD, so I listen intently and then blurt out what it made me think of before you're through talking.

Okay, in reality, I've worked on this a lot over the years, but it still happens.

 

At the Outback Steakhouse in the US if there's room at your table it's policy (or it was) for the server to sit down in the booth with you for your initial order.

Still, I can't say that a tongue ring is any less sanitary than, well, a tongue. If your server is licking your food and it's not the sort of place where you pay extra for that kind of thing, it's pretty much irrelevant.

 

If you're 42 right now, that also means you were born on the cusp between Gen X and the Millennials. I'm 40 and in the same boat. It's no wonder you identify with both. We had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. We remember when tattoos and piercings were part of the fringe not well thought of by square society and we remember them becoming ubiquitous. It's very common for "Xennials" (not my favorite name) to identify with both the bored cynicism of the grunge era and the almost sickening optimism of the elder Millennials. We're stuck right in the middle.

Incidentally, my favorite name for our micro-cohort is The Oregon Trail Generation, but they seem to have settled on Xennials. Generation Catalano is kind of funny, if you watched the show, but I would have gone with My So Called Generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

 

I think every generation does two things.

One: they respond to what they've been landed with.

Two: they create stuff to hand down.

Sometimes it takes a while for these things to be identifiable.

I, as a child of the complacent, consumerist Fifties, who reached teenagerhood in the swinging, defiant Sixties, and adulthood in the hey we're finally FREE Seventies never dreamed that the pendulum would swing both ways. We assumed the generations that followed us would be even MORE liberated than we were. Once a problem is 'solved,' we move on, right? We don't go 'back.' Alas, that wasn't to be. Solutions cause problems too.

The pendulum swung back, and our children's generation became more conservative (with a small c - I'm not talking political parties here) than we were. Partly because our expectations were unrealistic in some respects, and partly because the newer generation had to respond to things we weren't aware of, or hadn't happened yet. (AIDS, rapidly rising prices—which meant a 'good job' became essential—the onset of the computer age which began putting jobs at risk, etc.)

Every generation has its own problems to solve. And I hate to have to say it to the 'okay, boomer' mindset, but your generation will ALSO cause problems for the ones that follow.

It might be smart to realise the boomers didn't create themselves—the previous generation did. In addition to beating Hitler, they happily produced more babies than any generation since, and more babies than any generation before them had successfully raised to adulthood. That kind of population growth is not sustainable, and the 'boomers' began to reduce those numbers when THEY reached adulthood. Hence the solution (have fewer babies) also created the problem (the boomer generation outnumbers the following one.)

Every generation creates problems as well as solves some. Best to keep an open mind.

 

When I want Chicken Fajita wraps but there's only Southern Fried Chicken.

 

Presenting video footage in the wrong aspect ratio. HULK WANNA SMASH DISPLAY!

 

When people say 'there's nothing worse than...' and proceed to mention something pretty trivial. I am guilty of saying this myself. But it annoys me—even when I say it.

 

Kagome's voice in Inuyasha.
Idk if its her voice or the voice actors bad acting..... Cant. Stand. This. Character.

 

It's back-to-school time here. It annoys me to see parents buying the cheap(er) junk for their kids, when for just one € more they would get something significantly better.

One of the products that almost physically pains me to see bought is the TI-30 Eco Scientific Calculator. Nothing against TI, despite their aggressive push into the educational market when I went to school, but this product is an abomination. I'm a physicist, one of those freaks that still uses a calculator outside of school, so I know.

"But it's ECO", they say. "Recycled plastic. No Battery", they say. Exactly. No battery, just a solar cell, which robs it of one of the essential functionalities. It turns off all the time, resets settings, forgets stored numbers. It's a torture device, not a calculator. In particular for those kids that struggle with math and calculators anyway. In god's name, get a normal TI-30. OK, the local stores don't stock them, so get the Casio they do stock. It's €2 more, but it actually WORKS.

 

Anytime you call my pharmacy, you have to listen to a message encouraging customers to use the drive-thru. Well, OK, but if they don't clean that credit card terminal they send out to you after every customer (and I doubt if they do), I'll continue to go inside.

 

I hate that S has four different sounds as s, sh, z or zh (like "vision"). While Z is z or zh, what is the point of Z then? Given in our heads we associate the z sound as Z its weird so many S have turned into z. And the zh also has lots of different spellings because it can also be G like "beige" or Ti like "equation". This is absolutely needless.
Furthermore, C is a completely superfluous letter that simply replaces an S or K. Q is k or kw. And X is just z or ks.
People complain about the needlessly complex and contradictory vowel variation, but the variation in consonant sounds is almost worse because it seems relatively sensible and largely one-to-one but isn't. At least with vowels there is the excuse that there aren't enough vowel letters to properly express everything, so even if vowels were more sensibly spelt it would be more complicated. Consonants could easily be simple and efficiently allocated.
Ah well, language is weird.

 

Yeah, but ancient spelling conventions that freeze an orthography in the past while the language continues to evolve are even weirder. But I wouldn't change it for anything.

 

This is honestly a news item in today’s broadcasts. Ofcom have ‘revealed’ the number of hours we spent watching TV surged during lockdown.

Really!?

 

Have no idea how my laptop's keyboard keeps getting so dirty.

 

I kinda hate TI and most other manufacturers because of their algebraic entry system. I grew up with Hewlett-Packard calculators that used RPN! Farr superior. (The fact that my dad worked for HP back in the day has nothing to do with my opinion, of course. Okay, maybe a little bit. But still: RPN!) Unfortunately, you can only get the classic HP calculators off Ebay or other second-hand sources these days. I have quite a collection of them. I rage, rage against the dying of the light.