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

David Walliams' face.

* People who call apes "monkeys"

defend this to my dying breath. it's like calling yetis "bigfoots".

don't get me started on prosimians.

You've seen these billboards too, then?

Yes, along with the frequent adverts in the papers.

ledge: Aus masterchef. Something about using a smartphone to FB people for recipes, like I give a hot damn, I've never watched the show.

i know i was half-kidding :)

boring scandal tho, was hoping someone had smuggled some pre-made haute cuisine up their ass or something.

Haha figured you were, still. The whole masterchef phenom leaves me cold, and I'm a lover of cooking shows.

*waits for sic to inform me I cant bitch about a show I havent seen, bla bla*

have never seen the aus one, sounds like they're playing up the apprentice angle, which could be horrid. love the uk one, virtually no reality show backstabbing bullshit, just people who can cook, cooking. 'the professionals' version is even better, watching people who are already good at something being pushed to excel themselves is awesome.

when you click on a link to contact a website and microsoft fucking outlook decides to open rather than just taking you to a page with contact info

David Walliams' face

i thought about posting this here a few times. the ad for that new show makes me want to kill. self congratulatory "hilarious news for people who think being liberal is a great achievement" format needs to die.

what i came here to post was...this woman in the doctor's surgery this morning who stared at the sign that displays your name when it's your turn to see a doctor, and everytime it wasn't her shook her head in disgust and totally eyeballed whoever had been called. like..how small minded and nasty a person do you have to be?

If it's anything like my surgery, this woman has been sitting there for 45 minutes, having turned up 'on time' for a scheduled appointment, and can't for the life of her figure out why people who've arrived after she did are somehow being seen before her.

i dunno, i thought the opposite, cos i arrived on time and was seen straight away.

I hate when strangers go so far out of their way to make you feel bad for some small thing you did wrong that it somehow haunts you for ages or even forever.

Can think of two examples, literally twenty years+ ago. Once in a grocery line and very slightly bumped an old lady standing too closely behind me - said "oh, I'm sorry!" just out of simple politeness, not because I actually thought I'd done wrong, but this apparently very bitter and entitled woman unexpectedly snarled at me "You should be!"... jesus.

The other time was when teenaged me was sitting on a bench in a large, glassed in mall entrance vestibule, waiting for a bus when this delivery man - large and able bodied I might mention, pulls up outside and unloads a stack of boxes onto a dolly and heads for a door at the opposite end of the vestibule from me - like at least twenty feet away from where I was. No one else was around, so yeah, I had a clear view. Now when he actually got to the door, he unexpectedly (to me) struggled a bit to get this stacked up dolly through but by then it seemed too late to help. Once inside, he proceeded to tell me off for not having enough manners to get up and hold the door! I felt so shocked and unjustly maligned. Still gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

people who hold their arms like a tyrannosaurs rex while they're "power walking." just hold your damn arms at your side like the rest of us.

pics or it didn't happen

Ha, something like that...

I was tapping away, as I do, in a queue,when the man in front turned and said "I'm sorry if I am taking a whle, I am blind", to which I replied "Oh, it's not tapping through impatience, I just do drumming on things..."

Which I do. Mind you, it drives me nuts if I was next to someone drumming when I was not, so hey.

when you dial customer support for just about anything, spend 5 minutes talking to a robot, give them your account number, get transferred to a real person, and give your name, address, account number (again), last 4 numbers of your SSN, etc. etc., then have to get transferred to somebody else, whose first question is, "what's your account number??"

That's on this thread already! That's so annoying!!!

really? i thought i was the only one bothered by that. good to see I'm not alone

I hate when strangers go so far out of their way to make you feel bad for some small thing you did wrong that it somehow haunts you for ages or even forever.

Arrgh! When I was a kid, me and a friend were waiting patiently by a phonebooth to use it. This batty old lady barged up, pushed in front of us and into it after the person we'd been waiting on was done. We mildly protested this, but couldnt do much. Then we heard her saying on the phone to whoever "yes these AWFUL little girls just tried to shove their way in front of me, I dont know what manners they teach children nowadays".

People confusing "virgin birth" with "Immaculate Conception." I'm not even a theist, let alone Catholic, but this bugs the ever-loving shit out of me.

when you dial customer support for just about anything, spend 5 minutes talking to a robot, give them your account number, get transferred to a real person, and give your name, address, account number (again), last 4 numbers of your SSN, etc. etc., then have to get transferred to somebody else, whose first question is, "what's your account number??"

Ok guys –– every call center I've worked at, I had to do this. It was some kind of stupid privacy protection mandate, but additionally, sometimes the computer would bring up the wrong fucking screen! It's a way to check against that. I mean, I hate doing this when I call a place, putting a 1/4 oz of blood into the automated system to verify my identity and someone still asks my name at the end. But ––– at least be nice about it, please ILXors, who really should be a higher class of citizen! I hated the first few seconds of a call because asking one identity question made people so apopleptic and indignant. "GOD, can't you SEE my ACCOUNT NUMBER? Isn't it RIGHT THERE ON YOUR SCREEN?? Or did a HARPY pluck out your EYES and you can't see it, because I think that's what you DESERVE MY HUSBAND IS DYING I DON'T NEED THIS AMERICA DOWN THE SHITTER BLAH BLAH" Just say the account number and move on!

I am sure you guys are nice about it but reading that gave me ~~flashbacks~~

"GOD, can't you SEE my ACCOUNT NUMBER? Isn't it RIGHT THERE ON YOUR SCREEN?? Or did a HARPY pluck out your EYES and you can't see it, because I think that's what you DESERVE MY HUSBAND IS DYING I DON'T NEED THIS AMERICA DOWN THE SHITTER BLAH BLAH"

I am going to quote this verbatim in a slow monotone the next time I need to make a customer service call.

xpost Kim you are clearly canadian

so concerned for others

If you want to have some fun, Dan, go here and paste it in to try out the different voices:

http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

"WHO'S YOUR SUPERVISOR!!? I DEMAND TO TALK TO THE SUPERVISOR!! THESE GUYS DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT TITS!!!"

well there goes all of my productivity today

seeing the phrase 'a delicious burrito' all the damn time, that is an innocuous annoying thing, now i want a delicious burrito

"WHO'S YOUR SUPERVISOR!!? I DEMAND TO TALK TO THE SUPERVISOR!! THESE GUYS DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT TITS!!!"

If you have to call customer services about tits, I just don't know.

i agree on the burrito thing. dan i suggest changing your name to "chupacabra -- a delicious mound of feces"

"National Birdwatchers Hotline, can I help you?"
xp

Call centers suck for the reasons mentioned above but one thing I loved is that since they couldn't see me, I was free to make every mocking face and obscene gesture I wanted.

The other is "I hate your stupid automated system, why does it exist?". Cuz of it didn't, we'd have to triple our staff and your cost would go way up and then you'd bitch about that.

"If my call is so important, why don't you answer the phone?". Yea, we just sit around letting it ring off the hook and pick it up after 30 mins or so /popcopytrainingvideo.

Also my fav was when people mistook the obvious automated A.I. Voice for a real person.

"I kept trying to tell the lady I wanted to cancel but she just kept repeating herself!"

since they couldn't see me, I was free to make every mocking face and obscene gesture I wanted.

This is kind of bad now that I DON'T work at a call center though as it's a hard habit to break. My classmate pointed out every time this one interrupty guy talks, I throw my pen at my notebook and roll my eyes in a really obvious way. Terrible!

Automated systems are evil and Ronald A. Katz should burn in hell. But I also hated complaints about them. EXCEPT when they asked, "Are you a robot?" because that always gave me an awesome weird feeling.

i agree on the burrito thing. dan i suggest changing your name to "chupacabra -- a delicious mound of feces"

did someone link the poop burger already? aw

I enjoy talking to automated systems - they are very polite if stupid

i don't really have a problem with an automated system, I just dislike how incredibly slow it is, especially the ones that try to sell you things all the while, as though "people calling to report a problem with your product" is a good match for "people who would like to buy more products"

a lot of them have the ones where you can just talk to them, saying numbers and like a brief description of what you want to do, which always creeped me out since you're basically talking to a robot.

you can always tell robots from humans because they speak so slow and perfect

When I was a kid, my family called the automated system voice Beverly. If you were on a long call like that, you spent a long time talking to Beverly. I would sit around and try to imitate the hyper"nice" way Beverly talked. I think maybe I did sound like Beverly on the phone, if Beverly had been a two-pack-a-day smoker for four years.

I feel you but automated systems need clearly marked escape hatches for ppl who actually need to speak to a human. I had to call Amtrak way too many times this past week for an issue requiring human customer service and having to deal with the fake chipper AI, Julie, every time while she listed the 15 things I didn't need so I could go to the sub menu of 15 more things I didn't need until I just mashed the keypad with my palm and got connected to a human did not exactly put me in the mood to be nice to anybody. (I was nice, btw. But it took some intentional effort.)

Then to be on hold for the human and have to hear a looped recording about how Julie could help me with the 30 things I didn't need help with... rage rage rage.

(and this all to confirm that yes, we still want to travel as scheduled even though you are now doing apparently completely unpredictable "scheduled maintenance" that you did not schedule far enough in advance to warn us when we bought the tickets and now have to take a fucking bus for four hours, yes, Julie, where is your option for that????)

"Just answer Yes or No"

YES!

"Just answer Yes or No"

YES!

"Just answer Yes or No"

YES!

Just hit 0 - escape hatch

Xpost Actually that is prob just a bored employee fucking with you

It is my lifelong dream to be a Speak 'n Spell

Just hit 0 - escape hatch

I'm sorry. That is not a valid selection. Please choose from the following options: to hear schedules, press or say one. For existing reservations, press or say two. To learn about our frequent riders' program, press or say three.

Ten minutes later…

To learn about the materials used to manufacture the hand soap in our bathrooms, press or say 14. To have an Amtrak representative come to your location and put you out of your misery, press or say 15.

agggh the worst part was that I was just calling because we had moved and needed the service moved over, but we weren't even allowed to get ANY support because apparently our bill was unpaid (the check had been in the mail for nearly a week!)

Just hit 0 - escape hatch
I'm sorry. That is not a valid selection.

or *, or #. hammering one of those good and hard several times usually does the trick for me.

EDF have moved to a spoken word driven system. i don't trust it to be able to tell the difference between "five" and "nine" anymore than i trusted my phone to handle 12 digit cc numbers without double registering digits under the old system. so yes, human operator every time.