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

^^ 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.

Has iTunes been mentioned on this thread yet? This morning all the "The ... " bands on my iPod are now filed under T.

- multi part tweets

I stopped at a New Jersey gas station once and was quite surprised to be surrounded by dudes in white jackets. Oregon would drive me crazy.

I worked at a (self-service Kwik-w-mart deal) gas station when I was in college and I was forever having to go out to the pumps and show people from NJ how to pump their gas.

that makes me so irrationally angry that i always make sure to have enough gas before entering new jersey

I got yelled at in NJ a couple years ago because I didn't know about this stupid law and started trying to pump my own. Some man came running out of the store shouting at me. It was all very confusing and annoying.

xpost The Italian I hear up and down Harlem is not the pretty poetry Italian, fwiw.

It really bugs me when the trash guy leaves our trash bin right in the middle of our driveway. Then I have to either stop in the middle of the street to move it, or drive around the block and park just to get into our garage. I'm not sure that counts as innocuous, though, as it causes me to alter my behavior.

that makes me so irrationally angry that i always make sure to have enough gas before entering new jersey

I actually try to wait until NJ to fill up. For some reason, even though it's full-serve, it's the cheapest gas in the northeast (usually by a significant amount).

And now he's abbreviating plurals weird: Exh.s and No.s instead of Exhs. and Nos. (for Exhibits and Numbers).

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not how abbreviation ever has worked, right??

Sorry, jg--I confused your post upthread with its opposite and thought you were saying you PREFERRED full-srvc, which seemed super out of character.

Jesse: Maybe he's thinking of the period as an apostrophe, where it represents the missing letters?

I've never seem "exhibit" abbreviated as "exh" (I see Ex. and PX or DX/RX (defendant or respondent, depending).

haha in related bizarre apostrophe misuse news, i saw the following today:

we sell hot food and soup until "4.30"

the food was in fact very nice (and lots of it) so i am not angry at all

If that LOLyer is writing prose, he should just write out "numbers" and "exhibits." Were he in my legal writing student, we would have a one on one talk after class about this.

Wait if he were in my legal writing student, I'd get the dean involved.

Other Unknown Oregon Laws
• Ketchup can only be dispensed from behind the counter at restaurants.
• Library books may only be checked out via mail.
• Major appliances such as refrigerators or washing machines may only be installed by a licensed and bonded contractor.

Are those enforced?

And all of the attorneys have changed their settings on Word so that Ctrl+S no longer means Save and Ctrl+P no longer means Print. Instead they Ctrl+S = § and Ctrl+P = ¶. I have to work on documents on their computers, and I have a compulsion to save a document very frequently, so every single every time I use their computers, the document I'm working on is full of random § marks.

xps - Jenny, "Exh." is a really common abbreviation in work that crosses my desk. I remember seeing "PX" and "DX" in one case in 2008 (in US Court in the Southern District of IA), but otherwise it's "Exh." in state and federal cases and in agencies.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that is what is commonly in use.

I'm referring to use of "Exh." in cites at the end of sentences, e.g. Blah blah blah. (Exh. A, Deposition of Yoyo Mama, P. 8).

Rather, "Dep. of"

Yes, WmC. These laws are enforced by the Oregon State Bureau of Codes & Bylaws.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kYwi9sT2Ya0/ThT3od7sOXI/AAAAAAAAAIg/bRlsji_aO4I/s1600/why.jpg

Its funding is derived directly from the state's sales tax on retail goods.

That library book law is fucking bizarre. How does that even work?

I believe you, Jesse. You see a much wider variety of this stuff than I do, and there are definitely internal traditions in our specific abbreviations. I am compelled to point out that the Bluebook advises "Ex." but I'm guessing if you check out section B7 in the Bluepages you'll find you don't see a lot of Bluebook compliant court/litigation doc citations in general.

And to be topical: non-Bluebook compliant legal citations in formal legal writing.

The library thing: Works a lot like the old catalogue stores run by JC Penny or Sears Roebuck. Now though, you can go to a website like this and make your selection.