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

I thought it was "trace" but someone told me they always thought it to be like "Tracy" and that kinda blew my mind (like finding out "Louis" is pronounced like "Louie")

old people who mention in general conversation how they're probably going to die soon. not like your grandpa in a serious convo, but this patron at work telling me she's not going to bother learning some new skill because she's 76 and she's probably only got 10 years left. quit feeling sorry for yourself, you already made it further than most people.

my step-grandmother does this all the time and i get annoyed at her too.

a) ppl who try to organise, say, a camping trip by sending out a group email with no joke, at least 10 date ranges to choose from. none of which fall anywhere near public holidays FOR WHICH CAMPING WAS DESIGNED. but it's more the vast number of dates to sift through that annoys me

b) ppl in the email group, notorious slackers/non decision-makers who respond to said email saying either "any time is good for me just let me know" or "I can go on these 4 dates let me know what you decide"

sometimes I hate my friends.

needless to say we should get this trip nailed down by...oooh December

ppl who step into the elevator, press the button for their floor, and then stand there as if guarding the buttons from any further use

this has surely been mentioned already, but searching 10k posts for it would make me ia

elevator use is almost 100% ia start to finish

pretty much anything that involves people lately just makes me reach for my flamethrower

The other day I had a long elevator IA post planned but I forgot it by the time I got to my office. It was about people who get on the elevator and say "Going up?" when there is an indicator light showing which way the elevator is headed.

Wait did I post this already? I can't even remember anymore.

This actually happened to me while reading your post while riding the elevator back from lunch a minute ago.

I said that this morning to someone in the elevator with me at my kids' daycare. We were in the lobby and there are only two floors. I thought I was hilar.

I have one coworker who is not able to ever ride an elevator in silence. She's lovely, quite pleasant to talk to normally but it's like the confined space makes her nervous so she will gab away about her lunch or her shoes or her hair or her jacket or whatever for the entire elevator ride (thankfully only 2 floors). I always want to hug her and say 'shhh it's okay, it's okay"

Stop. Sharing. George Takei. Posts.

old people who mention in general conversation how they're probably going to die soon.

My dad's side of the family is notorious for this, but not in a self-pitying way. My dad and his sisters were all late-80s to mid-90s when we last spent holidays together and their small talk was, "Yah, 88's old enough."

"Yah, that's for sure. I don't want to live as long as Papa or Ma. Even Uncle Ludwig lived too long."

Putting zombies in everything. Over-saturation of zombies has really grated on me.

Stop. Sharing. George Takei. Posts.

OMG yessss. He's just like everyones weird old uncle who just discovred the internet. THATS NOT FUNNY.

Stop. Sharing. Andy Borowitz. Posts.

fixed

the elevator at work has front and back doors, leading to even more awkwardness

tbh nearly everything in this thread involves rational anger -- my biggest truely irrational anger is when ppl try to talk to me (in person) when i am on the phone. that is also rational, but it enrages me way out of proportion to its objective offensiveness. fortunately this doesn't happen much since i stopped working in bookstores

and/or truly

Oh gosh yes I am like that about phonecalls too. I'm like "ffs I cant listen to two people at once". Esp hard thanks to hearing loss in one ear.

ppl who leave radio/music playing while they are watching tv.

On the flip, I'm not crazy when people on the phone are all "So yeah we're going to meet -- oh shit. What's going on? There's .. like.. some blue lights up here. Everyone's slowing... Huh. Just a guy pulled over speeding... I wonder how fast he was going?"

SO WHEN ARE WE GOING TO MEET, YOU WERE SAYING?

I used to have a friend who'd call me at random when he was bored at work (worked nights often) and, every time without fail, while talking to me something to do with his job would cause him to say "hang on gotta take this" and put me on hold/put the phone down while he did work things. Frequently, the call would be 90% me sitting there waiting for him to finish work shit. I got fed up with it eventually and told him to stop calling me WHEN HE CANT TALK BECAUSE HE IS BUSY AT WORK.

haha my ex had a friend who would basically only call her when she was in cabs or something because she was bored

you guys have cool friends

the opposite is just as bad. I used to sit next to a friend of mine at work and he'd start telling me something and I'd reply and as I was about to start replying he'd say 'Hold on I'm on a call'...and I'd be like RRAAAGGGH DON'T START A CONVERSATION WHILE YOU'RE ON THE PHONE YOU JERK

the best was when I first moved here, I had to call my mother in law about something, who was a teacher at the time. I call her cell phone and she answers it and I start talking and she says "Um I can't talk right now I'm TEACHING A CLASS". I was mortified. Like holy shit dude let it go to voicemail then! The thing I found out later was she didn't know how to retrieve voicemail so she habitually answered ALL incoming calls, no matter where she was.

!!!!!!!!!

I don't mind taking phone calls at work, I find it snaps me out of autopilot, sometimes you get lonely sitting in a cubicle.

Jesse calls me at work and puts me on hold bc he's busy and I just hang up. He always calls back.

People who can't be bothered to review the material before coming to an important meeting...when they have been specifically assigned to a committee and asked to review the material.

Jesse calls me at work and puts me on hold bc he's busy and I just hang up. He always calls back.

Read that as "Jesus" first. Didn't know carl was a Nashville songwriter.

"Jesus, Hold My Calls"

ppl who leave radio/music playing while they are watching tv.

This. I don't know what it is, but I get this massive surge of contempt for people who leave multiple sources of noise going? I want to shake them until their heads snap and then turn everything off and start over.

But I'm also the fuckin killjoy who says you can either listen to music in the car, or talk. Not both.

ha, i recently spent time in the company of someone who listening to music while playing online games with the sound effects on, i was all set for strangling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS_OVZtVa4E

Didn't know carl was a Nashville songwriter.

― pplains, Wednesday, June 6, 2012 1:33 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I once had a dream I won an award for a country sing called "You Changed Your Heart (Why Won't You Change Your Mind)." I'm going to write that sng one day.

bosses/managers/higher-ups who fuck something up for you and instead of saying 'whoops, nevermind', they just stay the course, attempt to justify it, and make everything worse for everyone

Failure and Rescue, by Atul Gawande

But I'm also the fuckin killjoy who says you can either listen to music in the car, or talk. Not both.

Argh! Why? Music can play in the background. Are you also against music in bars? My boss does this. She, a co-worker, and I had to take two two-hour rides to and from a meeting and she would turn off the radio at the slightest conversation, so we wound up sitting in silence for long stretches.

Strange, I was on the phone at the bus stop and some guy started conversing at me about somebody walking by barefoot. He just kept on chatting while I was talking.

I can't hear when there are more than two things going on at once.

It makes me anxious. I usually turn down the car radio when I talk, and then turn it back up again. If I'm at a bar and there's music and a group of people talking, I either talk to the person next to me as best I can, or I just don't even try. It makes me feel like I'm going deaf or something, I hate it.

I like to have music on in the background when I have friends over for drinks and we're chatting, but obviously not at "have to shout to be heard" level.

On the other hand, I have a mate who would come over with a ton of his vinyl, expressly to listen to certain albums, like *listen* to them, and halfway through the first track he starts blathring about how it is really awesome how the guitar break in this bit goes doodlyoodly and then he goes off on a tangent and I'm like "why are we doing this"

Still, thats better than the dour, silent IDM listening parties my ex and his buddies would sometimes have at our house lol jeez. 3 hours of srs chin-stroking to Autechre. EXCITING.

went to the local restaurant around the corner with the kids. i like the place. i support it. i have friends who work there. a friend of mine waited on us. after we got drinks (which my pal the bartender paid for) and some chips and salsa and were enjoying ourselves another waitress came over and said: i have some bad news. what? we have to ask you to move. why? we have a table of 8 we need to fit. really? then after i look all mean and sad she says we don't HAVE to move but of course i would feel like a jerk if i didn't and my friends are there but we were comfortable! we were waiting for our food! but we grabbed everything off of the table and moved to a booth next to the kitchen. grrrrrrrrr....

it made me irrationally angry. but i kept my cool. nobody has ever asked me to do that! ever! and i get so irrationally slighted in my old age its the kind of thing that makes me want to stop going there. but i like it there! (the waitress who asked us to move has pissed me off twice before. she's the only person there who has ever pissed me off. this probably had something to do with why i got mad.)

i felt like saying, you know what, take the table. we'll take our food to go.

i mean i get it you don't want an 8 top to walk away and go somewhere else, but, hey, you sat us there! no take backs!

music on in the background isn't the same as listening to it

i can't drive and keep music loud and talk at the same time. i'm usually a very good driver when i only have one other thing going on in my head. music + conversation makes me a terrible and dangerous driver. wouldn't surprise me if others were the same.

scott that is not irrational at all. restaurants aren't supposed to do that.

yeah that's a shitty thing to do.

I've only been ever asked to move to accommodate a larger party once, ever, at a Pizzeria UNO in Virginia. The party looking for seating offered to pay for my and my wife's dinner, and in fact they did. I am extremely bribebable.