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

It's especially annoying when your bus sits there long enough so the next bus overtakes you. I've been told they do this because it's better to have 1 bus be really late than 2 buses be slightly late, for their statistics.

Gah, for their statistics? What about for their passengers' jobs? Fucking annoying.

Come now carl, you've used the CTA long enough by now to notice how little of a crap they give about the riders.

bus bunching may sometimes be deliberately caused by individual bus drivers, so that the bus ahead of them picks up more passengers and decreases their own workload.

but, yeah IA @ this

Yeah, when I was on an hourly bus route buses leaving early were so gutting! (or bypassing my stop altogether, as I saw one do as it took a wrong turning just metres away, but far enough that I couldn't catch up with it)

Especially because the bus was often 10-15 minutes late, so you didn't really start to think you might have missed it until 20 minutes had passed, and then it wasn't worth going home, just standing around for another 40 minutes and hoping the next one came - and knowing that if the last one hadn't run at all then the next one would likely be too full to pick you up anyway. Gah.

xp this sounds uncharacteristically pollyanna-ish, but since I take the CTA nearly every day I really try not to focus on the ways that they suck (hard to do sometimes, granted), but think about how great it is that they even exist. Otherwise I spend 30 minutes at the start and end of every day angry, which isn't good for my health.

Also I really like the new train car layout so every time one of those pulls in I get unreasonably excited. I'm thinking that will get me past any CTA rage for at least the next six to eight months.

And the new cars have the opposite effect on me.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

Conversation that happens every time we ride the train together and step into one of the new train cars:

Jeff: I hate these cars.
Carl: I love them!

Every time.

They have new cars now? That is so cool. I once got to ride on one of the old-old cars (green, old-timey CTA logo, windows that opened).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/new-cta-rail-cars-hit-the_n_2123473.html#slide=1753706

Yup. They have center facing rows of seats, which creates a lot more room for standing passengers and also helps to avoid the natural bottlenecks that the old car design encouraged. Also the ride is smoother and they are quieter. Fewer places to sit, though, which is a bummer, and also if you do get a seat, you'll probably be touching your fellow passengers more than on the old cars.

When you have an exceptionally long line for something that eventually splits into two lines, but it's not clear from the back that there are two lines or where the two lines split, the assholes who try to use the "there are two lines" trick to cut ahead. Several people tried to pull this on me going through customs. Was not in the mood after a 12 hour flight with a baby and loudly told them to fuck right off.

To be clear, I mean people who get into the "shorter" line even though it's clear that everyone is waiting to get into both lines because they either can't see that there are two lines, or because it's too disorderly to have two clear lines all the way back. The civilized thing to do is obviously to go to the back and then split into one of the lines.

One dude actually yelled at me to "mind your own damn business." I told him "this is my business, because you're cutting in front of me."

I bet afterwards the people you yelled at were really. . . "hurting."

;)

LAX used to be terrible for that, I remember one year it was total chaos with people cutting in all over the fucking place. I think we ended up not beating them but joining them after an hour or so, so I was part of the problem. Last couple of times they'd discovered these wonderful inventions that clearly divide the queues up with this elastic ribbon stuff, it's a marvel the modern world isn't it.

That's one thing I <3 about Trader Joe's, that they clearly distinguish the lines all the way back and have a person standing there to force people into line in order of arrival. It satisfies my desire to see "justice" imposed, I guess.

Yup. They have center facing rows of seats, which creates a lot more room for standing passengers and also helps to avoid the natural bottlenecks that the old car design encouraged. Also the ride is smoother and they are quieter. Fewer places to sit, though, which is a bummer, and also if you do get a seat, you'll probably be touching your fellow passengers more than on the old cars.

― carl agatha, Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:00 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hm. I dunno, I would miss being able to sit staring out a window. Then again, I could count the number of times I got one of those seats during rush hour on one hand.

you just gotta live way at the end of the line like i do! it's seats galore. lots of window staring possibilities. also kinda why i don't like the new seats. i have to stare at a person before i stare out the window :-/

When you have an exceptionally long line for something that eventually splits into two lines, but it's not clear from the back that there are two lines or where the two lines split, the assholes who try to use the "there are two lines" trick to cut ahead. Several people tried to pull this on me going through customs. Was not in the mood after a 12 hour flight with a baby and loudly told them to fuck right off.

I said this about 10,000 posts in this very thread, but that's one of my biggest social anxiety triggers. And I am not a mental case.

The "corral" way of lining up is the most efficient. The bank does it with ease. Even the post office. In which place would you rather have to stand in line – a busier than fuck McDonalds or a busier than fuck Wendy's? But oh no, when there are not cattle gates or velvet theater ropes lining everyone up, we get to go back to good ol fashioned supermarket anarchy style. Every man for himself.

Some places you have to do it supermarket-style, such as a supermarket. You can't have 20 grocery carts queueing up in one line for three registers. But then there are those awful self-serve kiosks where folks will try to cut and stand behind their favorite station. Drives me crazy, and when some friendly manager suggests to me that the self-serve registers are open, it takes everything for me to not tell him to go fuck his mother.

Feeling you. I almost always go to a cashier, even if the line looks longer, than deal with the stress of how to line up for a self-checkout station.

I'm delighted by the line for a cashier while tumbleweeds pass by the self-check terminals. I'm happy to wait to be served by a person with a job, rather than contribute to the kind of automation that deprives people of employment.

using the self-check counters employs the people who operate the robots who make the robots who make the self-check equipment

btw I also get really nervous about those moments when you're in one line and then they open another line, and it's not made clear who gets to go in the second line, and sometimes arguments break out between the every-man-for-himself people and the first-in-old-first-in-new people.

I get so IA in the Aldi on the way home because I am usually just buying like 1-3 items and when they open a new line someone with a trolley of a week's worth of shopping always gets there first. I always feel like people should go "oh, you only have one item, go ahead" but I admit there is no particular reason they should

(I do let others with conspicously fewer items ahead of me occasionally but I am usually on the fewer-items end of the scale what with not having a car, so I'm not really entitled to write the universal rules of supermarket engagement)

Old lady offered me a go-ahead in Waitrose today; she had six things to my three. Declined offer even though she told me 'I've got all the time in the world...'

Awwww

instructors who are hired solely off their "field" resume rather than their ability to teach the subject matter.

instructors who don't know how to put together a competent, snappy, and effective powerpoint that's easy on the eyes, and instead just copy/paste ENTIRE paragraphs onto slides, so there'll be like an entire slide of text in a small font

and then test you on the minutiae of those giant paragraphs rather than the important parts, but it doesn't matter because you don't even know what the important parts ARE, because he's seemingly incapable of just whittling down the good stuff into easily digestible bullet points

and test you on the chapters in the two 1,000-page textbooks that we read for homework but never talk about in class, so again: we have no idea how much of this is FYI and how much we're actually supposed to absorb

instructors whose first language is english but who have really bad grasp of the written language, and the spelling errors don't bother you but you're frustrated as hell when you have to read a sentence three times to figure out what he's trying to say, and it's still ambiguous and poorly constructed. but you don't call him out on it too many times because you want to stay on his good side.

i mean, i know a lot of chefs are blue-collar dudes that don't come from an intellectual background, but if you've been hired in an academic context, figure that shit out.

when you go well out of your way to use an escalator because you're tired/lazy, and you get there and the bloody thing doesn't work

Going to a conference on data migration tomorrow. The invitation/event page/etc do not list the street number or the full postcode, only the name of the street. There is a link to Google street view, but that location is just a bunch of shops. In the end I found it by googling the name of the organisation putting it on, and it's not actually there but down the road. Really if they can't even get their own data straight what are they going to be able to teach us? I guess it gets me out of the office for a day.

I hate it when people say they work with a Seinfeld character. One of my IAs.

That said, I work with a Seinfeld character. She's the woman who always leaves out one vital piece of information.

For example, she asks me awhile ago if I uploaded all of the May content to our page. I say, yeah, of course I did. That's why I'm here.

She shakes her head and says, I didn't see one story! Really, I ask, you didn't even see the billionaire's son dressed up like Paul Stanley?

No, she says, none of it appeared on the page at all.

Finally, a little gear in my head shifts. Which page, I ask.

The FACEBOOK page! Did you put anything up?

No, I only worked with our local pages, like I usually do. Ask someone else about the Facebooks, Twitters, Vines, etc.

An eight-minute conversation that could've been eight seconds. She also calls my extension without identifying herself doing the "hey" thing, which I believe actually was a Seinfeld episode.

Our work phones show the name of the person calling when they call from an internal line so the standard way to answer a phone is to say, "Hi, Bob" when the call is coming from Bob's extension. My old job did not have such fancy equipment so I was used to politely introducing myself when I called someone and it took me like a month to adjust to his.

"Hey, Carl."
"Hi! This is Carl Agatha."
"Yes, I know."

"Hi, Julie."

"No, this is Steve. I'm using Julie's phone right now because we both had a question for you."

....

"Hi, Steve."

I don't know how they do it in AK, but we don't go using other people's phones all willy nilly around here.

AR! Ugh, I'm horrible. Sorry!

Since when have I lived in Arizona?

(One of my most reoccurring IAs, but you owned up to it at least.)

I know AK is Alaska is the thing. Anyway, yes, that would make me IA, too.

I used to live in Little Rock when I was a kid, you know. /blatant pandering

Did not know that. You can buy toothpaste on Sundays now.

My step-dad is from Park Ridge and my sister graduated from DePaul.

Hey, so did I!

My dad was in the USAF and was stationed in Little Rock for a couple of years. I'm assuming we were provided with military-issue toothpaste.

TRIVIA: Little Rock Air Force Base one of the few bases in the country not actually located in the town it's named after.

It's actually in Jacksonville, but higher-ups didn't want pilots flying off to northern Florida by mistake.

Nice to know they have such faith in their pilots.

You couldn't buy toothpaste on Sundays? Is that true?

State court workers making me IA today-

Me: I'm checking in for an agreed order that's not on the call.

Clerk: (not looking up) agreed orders are at 9:30. (Time is already after 9:30) Have a seat.

Me: will I be called?

Clerk: (slowly looking up and staring at me for a couple beats) I told you have a seat, didn't I?

"No reading while court is in session!"

???

You couldn't buy toothpaste on Sundays? Is that true?

Like 30 years ago, there were some awful blue laws. Most of them are gone, but you still can't buy a bottle of booze on Sunday.

Even Delaware dispensed with that nonsense a few years ago.

At least we can race horses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States