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

A new ia is not being able to get off a tram/train because everyone is so polite that they're all standing in the aisles RIGHT NEXT TO LIKE TWELVE EMPTY SEATS

This isn't really innocuous, mostly anyway, but its causing me no end of frustration. I signed up for my 401k two months ago and am still waiting to be able to log into the account. When I first signed up I had to fill out some information and they'd snail mail my access code. Fine. Annoying, but whatever. Get the code in the mail, oops. Turns out they had my email address wrong, so it locked me out. Called them, got the email address fixed and, of course, new code snail mailed out. Got new code, oops, name spelled wrong. Repeat process. Finally got the latest code yesterday and went to login tonight, still not working for some reason. Have to wait for yet another fucking access code to be snail mailed to me. This is ridiculous. Why are we still snail mailing this shit in 2011?

My retirement plan does that too. Boggles my mind.

My tax return was like that - they'd set it up but rather than leave the postal code blank, so I could put in my correct country, they'd filled it with spaces so it repeatedly told me 'invalid postal code'. DICKS

ia: seeing a facebook pic of a large group of my fellow alums/"friends" from my grad program partying down at a bar. gee, thanks for using any of the many points of contact you have for me to get in touch. also, thanks for never bothering to show up for any of the stuff i've sent you fb invites to. glad you're not above networking with me on linkedin!

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/110321/kaling_211.jpg

i was always nice and cheerful to everybody. i worked hard on all those group projects and was never a dick about my opinions. but i think they see me as a weird snob because i'm better-read/more aware of history than they are and i have esoteric tastes.

Not sure if this is that innocuous really but a lady at the (outdoors) tram platform this morning, in fairly strong wind, decided to spritz her face with some kind of perfume/face freshening scent/sunscreen (lord only knows). I happened to be walking up behind her. The wind blew a large cloud of mist droplets directly into my face and eyes. NFI what was in it but now I stink of flowers, my glasses have sticky droplets I cant get off, and my eyes are watering like MAD. Thank you, stupid bitch.

i'm allergic to cheap/strong perfume (it has a lot of irritants that higher-shelf scents don't have) and i feel so sick whenever i'm in the vicinity of it.

Yeah I can be too, especially rose oil/perfume, the smell of which makes me nauseous as all hell. Whatever this was it got in my eyes and they are still very irritated.

I cannot type the word "appliaction", it is driving me spare

I love rose perfume. I also love the fact that Firefox now has spellcheck built in.

I can never type commerical
but then I see there are nearly 17 million results on google for "commerical" so I don't feel so bad

The best one is mistyping "account" which used to happen a lot on my old job's tracking system. I'd get bored and put search terms in and the amount of "accocunt" I found in there was a goldmine.

A truly innocuous thing that makes me IA: when I am getting on or off the train with a group of people and there are people in front of me and behind me, and a dude (it's always a dude) in front of me decides to be a Nice Guy and let everybody on or off in front of him without recognizing that there are like five people behind him who are also trying to board or alight the train and getting exponentially more IA with every person he waves in front of him.

Alight is such an unnatural word.

It makes me IAlite.

Alight is great! I think one of the hated Bart signs says something like 'when boarding or off-boarding' which made me irrationally long for the word 'alight'

my favorite CTA phrase is "immediate follower." i'm going to write a song called "immediate follower" someday.

they always say "i DO have an immediate follower"

ia: when there's a meeting where the host conveys lots of useful information and people DON'T take notes. and later on, inevitably, those people ask the same questions that were already answered at said meeting.

i say this b/c i was in a meeting today and i was the only one taking notes.

(i think we're in this strange cultural moment where people learn that you absorb more information by just listening and not taking notes, but in my experience that's not true; ppl these days are way too ADHD to do any pure listening.)

i'm an unreconstructed note-taker; i don't trust my memory at all!

me too!

I also hate when you provide notes for someone on processes that you are teaching them, and they barely look at them when you are teaching, and never refer to them again even though they may ask you lots of questions about everything in the notes. UGH.

^^ Even worse when they just decide to make up their own process for it, which is inevitably completely inaccurate and causes a huge mess that you then have to sort out. Uuggghhh.

IA of the day: I only work one day a week in the office, which is always Thursday. Yet every Thursday when I arrive, I find my desk has been colonised by the guy who sits next to me. His stuff is EVERYWHERE. Coat, notebooks, pens, papers, backpack... all strewn across my desk. wtf is it so hard to remember that I kind of need to use that space each Thursday?

Chicago city buses come in many strange configurations, including one with a raised seat directly behind the driver so that anybody sitting on the inside of that seat could reach forward about a foot and flick the driver's left ear.

Okay so I get on a bus last night and it's that configuration and it's pretty crowded so I'm near the front. The outside seat in the weird raised seat directly behind the driver is open so I take it. The old lady on the inside is speaking to someone very loudly in Polish on her phone, but the bus is loud and crowded so it doesn't even register to me. Anyway, the bus driver turns around and tells me, very curtly, to tell the lady that she can't talk right in his ear like that, which made me IA because dude, I'm not going to holler at old Polish ladies on your behalf. You're the one in charge here so do your own dirty work. When I ignored him, he got a young woman standing next to me to speak to her instead.

There's probably some kind of sociological insight to be made there a la the Stanford Prison Experiment about an average citizen's response when a person of authority deputizes a citizen to do his job for him but I'm no sociologist and it's too early for that.

the word 'automagically'

Static electricity.

The five second delay between the person in front leaving the cash machine, and it allowing you to insert your card.

the five-minute delay between the person in front of you using the cash machine, deciding which options s/he wishes to select D00DS THEY DON'T CHANGE IT HAS THE SAME CHOICES AS ALWAYS

srsly is this just a "subjective perception" issue and do i take that long also? or are some ppl REALLY REALLY slow using cash machines

but yes, the five-second delay is also irksome

DON'T STAND BETWEEN ME AND MY MONEY, WORLD AT LARGE

^^ have often wondered this myself (xpost)

haha this is like that moment when you stop being "grrr this person driving in front of me is really dawdling PEDAL TO THE METAL GRANDAD parp parp" and become " grrr this person driving behind me is really hustling me SLOW DOWN CHILD you have yr whole life ahead of you putter putter"

<3 that post

D00DS THEY DON'T CHANGE IT HAS THE SAME CHOICES AS ALWAYS

Ah, yeah, but some cash machines are EVIL and they switch the money numbers around. So if you're used to one set-up and you're hurrying along you may end up getting out £100 instead of £10 and then going overdrawn and being charged extra £££ and not being able to afford your rent and then you get evicted and die alone and cold in the gutter. Always gotta look properly.

That's really weird about the bus driver telling you to tell the lady to stfu. Maybe he thought you spoke Polish.

Polish really is a hideous tongue.

Having to buy gasoline in the state of Oregon where there is no such thing as self-service.

Polish is beautiful IMO!

Come now, jg, surely you're inured to any chill or discomfort after 20 years of putting your own gas in the car during UP winters.

Okay no one drives from birth but you know what I mean.

Chicago has a dire Polish/Italian imbalance. One thing that gets me whenever I've been in NYC is how many stunningly gorgeous probably-Italian people - just regular working folks - there are just walking around amongst the rest of us. I don't recall as much Italian being spoken, or Italian accent as there is Polish here, but I would really prefer the prettiness of Italian to the crackling static-y sound of Polish.

I know one Italian guy. I can't understand a word he says. He have to sign to converse.

The associate atty. has to extract pages from PDFs and email them to me and our boss. He has Acrobat Pro on his computer, but he still prints the pages, walks back to the printer, scans them, then emails them to us. Besides being a silly and needless waste of time, the quality of the document is reduced and it winds up with a meaningless name like KMPT93934941343.

same old story as always, but i wanted to vent

Chicago has a dire Polish/Italian imbalance. One thing that gets me whenever I've been in NYC is how many stunningly gorgeous probably-Italian people - just regular working folks - there are just walking around amongst the rest of us. I don't recall as much Italian being spoken, or Italian accent as there is Polish here, but I would really prefer the prettiness of Italian to the crackling static-y sound of Polish.

This is some weird fetishization here, man.

Polish is a gorgeous language. idk whether Chicago Polish has a particular accent.

Yeh, re-reading that, I either didn't express myself well or I was just fetishizing Italians. I wasn't saying I think the Polish were ugly though. Only that the language and Polish accent (when speaking English) sound less as pleasant than Italian (and the other Romance languages and English).

Probably time to shut up.

You should do stand up comedy.

Haaaa

Come now, jg, surely you're inured to any chill or discomfort after 20 years of putting your own gas in the car during UP winters.

You can't pump your own gas in Oregon, so you always have to wait around until the attendant gets to you and it always takes like twice as long as just doing it yourself. I don't want to wait in the car - the pump is right there, I'm familiar with the technology and I could do it half the time myself. And yet.

Chicago has a dire Polish/Italian imbalance. One thing that gets me whenever I've been in NYC is how many stunningly gorgeous probably-Italian people - just regular working folks - there are just walking around amongst the rest of us. I don't recall as much Italian being spoken, or Italian accent as there is Polish here, but I would really prefer the prettiness of Italian to the crackling static-y sound of Polish.

Go to Harlem Avenue.