Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread)

every time my dad emails and mentions all the snow they've been having (which is a lot) he includes the phrase 'global warming I expect.............' which makes me both angry and confused because I'm not entirely sure he's not referencing an Armstrong & Miller sketch (who he likes) about ppl not understanding the difference between weather and climate, or whether (much more likely) he's doing a Daily Mail 'AND THEY SAY THE EARTH IS WARMING'. I don't want to even ask because if it's the latter it'll open a big argument that he won't understand.

- Signwriters who don't understand typography (so why are you a fucking signwriter) and do the letters backwards & upside-down e.g. this tragedy I saw last weekend:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5128/5275939599_8b9f40661d.jpg

The lovely little old ladies working at the local ye olde antique mall. I love them to death.

It's not their fault that they made me irrationally angry today but I realized as I approached the counter to pay for a handful of postcards that I should have given myself a 30 minute buffer zone to leave.

Not 1 but 2 ladies attending the customer ahead of me, who was buying assorted geegaws. A third lady wandering off to look up prices for other items, so technically 3 attending 1 customer.
Customer saying, "Well you know I thought that one was 20% off. But I'm not sure." etc etc for about 15 minutes.

And then when the customer paid, one of the old ladies began to complement her on her sweater which started a whole story about a sister in Santa Fe who wanted to give it to GoodWill which just about gave all the ladies a heartattack "GASP! NO! But it's so lovely!"

20 postcards. 5 for a dollar. I had $4 in exact change.

I think I may have had a silent aneurysm just standing in line.
It's my own fault for going there on my lunch hour...and god knows I would hate for it to be a rushy-rush place. The pace is part of the charm. BUT OH DEAR GOD IT WAS LIKE TIME WAS GOING BACKWARDS.

xp I don't know anything about typography but those A's are driving me crazy. The eye just...KNOWS? You know?@?

Exactly! AND the S is upside down.

and the C and S. And one of the Es. Aghaghagrggrghrghhhh

maybe not the C. I've gone cross-eyed anyway

You'll even see it in upper-middle-class clothing shops. The signwriter has cocked it up and everyone else has just left it.

Oh yeah! I didn't catch the S. The E's aren't the SAME as each other, which is a different problem. But I only noticed that on closer examination, it's really only the A's that set off my alarms.

ugh that sign is like sandpaper on my eyes, I can't TAKE IT raaaarrrrrr

A new thing that's annoying me: that sign is half a sentence. 'LADIES WEAR' what, exactly?

Uh. "Ladieswear"/"Ladies Wear" is not in the least bit a "new" thing. What?

(Now, saying "womens's pant" on the other hand....)

New as in I just noticed it.

- My boss wants me to use 'shall' incorrectly in formal documents and I am all raargghh atm

^^^^^ on that note, one of my former managers once told me that a client of ours (who I can't name, but their name ends in an S, so for purposes of illustration, I will call them FLOOGLES) blew a gasket at her when she wrote their name as a possessive adjective.

Because she wrote it Floogles's, they got mad that "our name doesn't have two Ss". IT'S THE ENGLISH FUCKING LANGUAGE, IDIOT!

i would blow a gasket at that as well. i do not consider s's proper use of the english language, no matter what any cunt says

Can't STAND that. The pos s is just as valid as the s pos, according to the OED that I've been using forever.

xp well I would be any cunt wouldn't i

having a name that ends in an s probably helps to stoke the rage

See now my brain is veering into rational anger territory. I am reigning myself in atm.

Thing that made me twitch visibly and hope nobody noticed: idly staring past a guy reading a paperback yesterday when he folds the front cover right back in such a way as to crease it down the middle

this should not bug me given that I let (some of) my books kick around in my rucksack until the covers are tatty and then go "eh, it was only a massmarket paperback"

also I have been irked lately by people using "tangible" to qualify abstract concepts, but now I see from the OED that it is actually A-OK to use it figuratively; guess it is just the two offenders I've noticed doing it with such a flourish of "look at this fancy word I'm going to use instead of any of several more obviously suitable words"

s's imo

we do not need another thread about 'cunt' in US vs other places, also imo

See now my brain is veering into rational anger territory. I am reigning myself in atm.

oh right so it's ok for you to post to this thread 100000000 times but my single post is igniting "rational anger" in you?!

See now the options available to me are (a) explode into a fiery rage about all the language transgressions that piss me off and the people who refuse to get them right despite knowing that what they're doing is factually incorrect (b) go all Whiney-style thread troll about the anger in the above half-dozen-or-so points not being irrational and therefore off-topic (c) remove bookmark and cry for a few hours.

xp esoj it's not your post that made me angry, it's the thoughts that came into my head at around that point, soz for confusion.

Oh and for the record I will go along with wherever people stick their S when they're doing possessives. No rage in that because I don't care enough.

oic sorry for outburst in that case

it's issues like s's (but that's not the only reason) that make me not use my preferred name and instead shorten it to a name i hate, makes life easier

no wuckers

Thing that made me twitch visibly and hope nobody noticed: idly staring past a guy reading a paperback yesterday when he folds the front cover right back in such a way as to crease it down the middle

This, especially when it's a book you've looked after and you briefly give it to a person who thoughtlessly buggers the spine in two seconds flat.

Also, people who LICK THEIR FINGER when turning pages (although probably rational anger, whoops).

In fact if ever there's an 'Innocuous things that make you rationally angry (a list thread)' thread I will have to ban myself from it, I think.

On borrowed/library books I get that rage completley. The opposite makes me irrationally angry when we're talking about books that I own.

<y best friend was daughter of librarian, a fact which she reminded me of constantly when I was folding down the corners of the pages of the books that *I owned*. She'd give me a tsk tsk and say I should look after my books or whatever and I'd tell her to shove it, they're my books I'll do what I like. When I got Poppy Z Brite's autograph she commented happily on the battered state of my copy of "Lost Souls" and said she loved seeing books that looked like mine bc she knew they'd been loved. And I turned to my friend who was with me and said "Ha!" bc I am very petty and childish :)

But I don't fold covers in half and I don't crack the spines of my books on purpose, or try not to. And I do take care of other peoples books. /to clarify.

Ah, yeah, I get incredibly nervous when I see other people damage books that they own, but obviously it's none of my business what they do to their own things.

'er indoors has taken to chucking books in her handbag and wrecking them, and I'm having to bite my tongue and stem my irrational anger sorrow. I admit that a worn book looks much more loved than my clinical, fold-free books all lined up unnervingly in the bookcase but I just can't do it.

(many xps) I dread having to form the possessive of words/names ending in s because different people have been taught very different rules about this at school, which some people don't realise and assume that anyone not doing it their way is stupid and ignorant. The way I was taught at school seems to be out of favour now, but I have seen people get berated for doing it and for not doing it and there is no safe option.

(there is at least one ILX thread which thrashes the s' versus s's thing out in more detail so I will not bother here. plus I do realise the things I was taught at school were not always true, but it was def not just my school, either)

I feel like there is a difference between unintentionally getting a book tatty in the process of carrying it around so you can read it and just taking a new book and going crrrack, but that is probably just because I do the former and hate the latter. I mean I feel a bit sad when I take a book out of my rucksack and the corner has split, but then I just have to shrug and not feel obliged to treat it like a priceless artifact when it really isn't

just imagine if you had changed schools halfway through your english education, you might have been a failing spacecadet.

Schooling. When I was in yr 8 (ish) an ex-pat American science teacher changed my 'colour' to 'color' and actually lowered my mark because of it. When I asked him about it, he said that's the way he spells it back home, and what we do here is not correct as far as he was concerned. It all ended well because I stabbed him to death.

lool

prety sure that's 'stabed'?

His name was Mr M0ns0on. He had no chin and looked generally like a mole.

Oh look see that aforementioned rational anger is seeping out now, I should stop.

why the googleproof if you murdered him?

'er indoors has taken to chucking books in her handbag and wrecking them

...what are you suggesting, little socks for your novels? o_0 I mean, books are for carrying around to read. Theyre cheap paperbacks. Thats the idea.

and all these years I've been eating them

omg are you calling my paperbacks 'cheap', madam?

If theyre not cheap yr doin it rong.

You want fancytiems collectibles, buy hardbacks.

...what are you suggesting, little socks for your novels? o_0 I mean, books are for carrying around to read. Theyre cheap paperbacks. Thats the idea.

― Strange Crüt (Trayce), Tuesday, 21 December 2010 12:41 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Wait, it sounds like you are calling my anger irrational in the irrational anger thread.

fwiw I use plastic bags that's right plastic bags.

coworkers who say the phrase "the computer/system is smart enough to...". the computer is just as good as whoever the fuck programmed it, stop projecting Skynet on the damn world!

eh i think that's ok tbh. a system can be smart, if it's well designed.

otherwise, y'know, you'd just go round getting into arguments with smartcars and smartphones to prove a point

Adam do you make people take off their shoes before theyre allowed in your house?

(I hate that shit)

xpost yea but then it leads people to blame all kinds of shit on computers when they fuck it up themselves cuz they assume computers are living organisms.

hell my best friend in high school thought computer viruses were life-forming

It depends on the book as well though. Right now I'm reading one of the books I bought in Johannesburg and don't want it getting wrecked so

xxxxxxxxp I don't mind AI discussion as long as it's within reasonable bounds. 'Smart' is just a shortcut way of saying there are algorithms that handle that sort of thing. It's when my mother thinks the computer is watching her and taking notes that things go a bit wrong.

xxp Do we make people take off their shoes? Christ, no. I don't want someone's foot odour honking up the place.